


Ruby and Strong are Friends

by Imboredwiththisshit



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Cannibalism, Catharsis Through Violence, Corruption of an Imbicile, Crossdressing, Dismemberment, Fuck the Police, Intimidation, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Racism, Radical honesty, Strong's dick, Toilet humor, alpha female sole survivor, casual nudity, childish bickering, epic supermutant on supermutant violence, excessive colorful language, fuck dialogue options, graphic field medicine, heavy substance abuse, motherhood does things to a woman's brain, non consensual platonic intimacy, physical and verbal abuse, speculative realism, unconventional ethics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-01-09 15:06:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12278970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imboredwiththisshit/pseuds/Imboredwiththisshit
Summary: My way of getting what I wanted out of Fallout 4 without the tedium and frustration of actually playing the game more than once.  This is the story of Ruby Magnesson, the sole survivor on her quest to blah blah blah you know the rest.  Along the way she finds herself siding more and more with a new race of mutants than the remnants of humanity. (Redone for the third time because continuity and stage direction.  Now with more tender delicious gib's!)





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Decided to overhaul this mess when it started getting too fangirly too fast. Apologies to anyone who already had to bleach their eyes.

Ruby knelt and disassembled her combat shotgun. Then carefully laid out all the components on her outstretched jacket on the ground. The exploded formation made for faster reassembly during the nightly ritual. The last time she handled a firearm was back in her long forgotten teens, but waking up alone in a tin can with giant cockroaches brought it all back in an instant. Now a week later, each day of shooting tightened her grip and sharpened her eye. And each night of maintenance brought her closer to mastery. Assessing all the moving parts of her firearms brought a strange catharsis along with assuring that come morning, no grit or rust would cause a malfunction and a subsequent risk of death or maiming.  
She got out the vodka, poured some into it's lid and set it down gently next to the unrolled bundle of small tools. She removed and unfolded her bandanna. There was plenty of coagulating blood to wipe away from the otherwise flat black barrel and properly oiled cartridge assembly. She was proud of the addition of that six inch bayonet – it kept her alive when the shotguns' rate of fire couldn't keep up with a mob of radioactive zombies throwing themselves at her. Though today she had been thrusting it into the necks of hulking mutants. The barrel had run so hot that the spattered red had baked on, just like that runny canned marinara sauce on that stainless steel tray back when she used to do lasagna night. She found herself missing lasagna night and tried not to betray any tremble in her chin to the super mutant. Thank god for the brim on her army cap. She only had to scratch her nose in order to hide her effort in keeping her face straight.

"What is human doing?" Said super mutant eyed her work while chomping and slurping away at a mangled carcass in the firelight.  
"What's that?" Ruby looked up, still wearing her mirrored aviators even though it was pitch black just outside their campsite. She couldn't see too far, but they helped to mask her deep discomfort with his size, his ugly habits, his godawful smell, his very presence in her space.  
He was humanoid, in almost every way looking like a muscular man, but grotesquely proportioned. His broad and knobby jointed frame was so massive that he wore the rusted panels of long dead automobiles for armor. His oily green skin was thick like an elephant's, and from head to toe pockmarked with old scars and embedded bits of shrapnel. He must have been eight feet tall, nine if he stood up straight. Squatting on the ground as he was, he still dwarfed her kneeling figure by almost three times. Some of the others in this old skyscraper had more complete armor and adorned themselves with human trophies. This one's minimal dressing was presumably the result of his position at the bottom of their totem pole.  
"Gun broken. Why human do that?" He disapprovingly gestured at her work with one of those lanky thick as tree trunk arms. In contrast to the ear splitting shouts and booming hollers that his kind was capable of, this calmer almost sleepy voice merely had a penetrating bass that she could feel in her chest. The rest still carried the distinct tone of a snarl. Same as the permanent scowl on his face.

"It's not broken, Strong." Ruby didn't yell even though she wanted to. "I just took it apart to fix it."

"Waste of time. Now time for resting." Strong scoffed and went back to tearing off mouthfuls of dripping flesh and sucking them down in large gulps. "Just take new one from enemies later."

"What if there isn't another one?" Ruby went back to her work, resigned to him already having an answer for that too.

"Strong use hands to kill enemies. Sometimes teeth. Stupid human." He paused to swallow, but there it was.

"That's fine for a big guy like you, but I'm barely average strength for a human. If I make one mistake out here, I DIE." Ruby smirked facetiously, having been called a giraffe many times in her youth. Then one last time when she got her first job as a prosecutor. She took a little snippet off a wire coat hanger and used it to pick bits of grit out of the cartridge chamber.

"Eat more, make human stronger." Strong lazily tore a kidney from the corpse in his hands and offered it too her, his sullen gaze and perma-scowl unchanged. It was hard for her to imagine any kind of thought process behind that face. It looked as though someone had started out a clay sculpture of a normal human head, but then slapped a couple extra handfuls clay about the face and neck and then rendered it with their knuckles.

"Thanks, I'll eat once I'm finished here." Ruby forced a smile and put a hand up, but didn't want to even touch that days old human kidney. It wasn't that she wasn't hungry – she was starving in fact. The sloppy, steaming blood on his greasy maw and blackened teeth didn't bother her too much either. It was that permeating stench that came off of Strong that got her gag reflex all a flutter. It had been getting her since she arrived that afternoon; a foul musk layered with caked and rotting filth. Moreover, whenever he opened his mouth she always got a whiff of his rancid breath. The campfire made out of burning trash somehow was making it bearable. Following Rex's distress call, she could smell this place long before she saw those twisted metal girders and the human remains on spikes rotting in the open air. It was like something out of Grognak the Barbarian or some shit. At least with feral ghouls, her nose and mouth were too distracted by that gritty, metallic cloud of radioactive dust that always came off of them. It wouldn't have surprised her one bit if she found out later on that a bite from a super mutant would cause some kind of horrendous flesh rotting infection. However, just being too close to feral ghouls was guaranteed to melt her cells whether they were attacking or not.

Strong obliviously shrugged, plopped the kidney on the ground between them and went back to his meal; an unwashed young woman, stripped of the flesh from her neck down to her hips. Arms and head dangling with gaping mouth and sunken glassy eyes. He had taken her down from a hook hanging from the lobby's ceiling and it looked like she'd been there for a day or two. This place was heavily littered with human and animal corpses in various states of dismemberment and decay; an indication to most sane people that entering the tower was a terrible mistake. They all probably responded to Rex's inexplicably compelling call and were ambushed, butchered and left hanging for future consumption. Perhaps making humans give into blind terror was their best hope of slowing them down, though today's experiences indicated that they never thought that far in advance.

Strong's careless rending of his victim's leg from its socket reminded Ruby that he merely tolerated her as a means to an end. If she hadn't survived the others; if she hadn't been so lucky after huffing all that jet and successfully picked them off one by one, he and his brothers would be eating her right now instead.

She took a glance to her side just to make sure Dogmeat was still there and he was; curled up on the ground, his head shooting up and his ears pointing to her like a pair of satellite dishes. His ability to rest around this prehistoric carnivore was either admirably brave or woefully naive. If Strong tried to eat this precious animal even once Ruby wouldn't hesitate to blow his fucking hands off.

"Sometimes Strong use club too." Strong broke the silence and startled her but she didn't look up, certain that any indication of fear would be met with immediate predation. Dog meat looked and wagged his tail timidly.

"Kay..." Ruby finally looked up at him and saw that he wasn't looking at her at all, but rather off in the distance somewhere as though he were immersed in thought.

"Thanks for sharing?"

"Welcome."

  
~

  
Rex Goodman, that damned radio personality that got her into this was a real piece of work. He braved this monster infested town, completely unarmed, on a foolhardy quest to civilize fucking carnivorous mutants by reading to them from Shakespeare. It made her think of the infinite monkeys on typewriters theorem. But she had to admit that even changing the outlook of one super mutant was a certain measure of success, the profoundness of which could not be denied. He struck her as the kind of guy that would talk his way into Fort Knox, have all the gold handed to him, and then get robbed at gunpoint on the way to the hospital where he was going to pay for a stranger's operation. She wasn't quite sure how she felt about that guy, but she couldn't deny feeling akin to him. She, after all, had gone out of her way from the frantic search for her newborn son and embarked on a suicidal rescue just because of the sound of his voice on the goddamned radio. And survived. Upon realizing the hair's breadth by which he had been saved, and trying to preserve his own dignity, he regally presented her with an elegant sequin dress and a super mutant barking at her about finding the 'milk of human kindness' like he couldn't tell two people apart. The dress was nice, but frankly useless to her, and Strong's companionship felt more like Rex had tricked her into signing up for full custody of his illegitimate special needs son.

Within moments of stepping out into the street from that tower, the early light of dawn lit up the big green ape's back and a caravan was shooting at them.

"Gaaah!! Gonna spatter your brains!" Strong took a couple bullets in his back, responding sluggishly to the pain as though he only got stung by bees. He spun around and ran at them head on, popping that cruddy old hunting rifle as awkwardly as one would expect with his over sized fingers. He first gunned down the guy that shot him and in the process hit their pack brahmin in the neck. The animal spooked and started to run, only to have it's huge ungainly load tip over and bring it down onto it's side. Dogmeat rocketed out with Strong and tore into a woman's arm as she fired a sawed-off at the green monstrosity overtaking her group.

"No! Stop!" Ruby tried to pacify the situation, but Strong had already used his weapon to violently whip that woman out of Dogmeat's jaws and into a nearby building. Her body made a sickening crunch upon impact and she fell to the ground in a heap. The others frantically kept shooting, their tragically small caliber bullets getting little more reaction from him than a sharp grunt. Then the white haired old man driving the wounded brahmin wielded a gleaming revolver and hit Strong right in the side of his head, finally knocking him back. But to his shock, Strong shouted in pain and only stumbled. He shook his head and his good eye soon locked onto his attacker, wide as a red marble in his fury. The old timer's thin wispy body probably had no hope of escape, so he quietly aimed that revolver again and was ripped in half at the exact moment of taking another shot.

Ruby stood helplessly and watched, she was not in danger so long as Strong was taking all the fire, but she couldn't move. She watched in horror as Strong, now bleeding profusely from his neck, threw the pieces of the old man aside and turned toward his next target.

"YOU SON OF A BITCH!!" The muscular middle aged woman in heavy leather armor fired one more slug into Strong's chest before he reached out and grabbed her by the neck. She flailed fervently, kicking hard and still squeezing the trigger. One shot hit Strong in the foot and another in his thigh as he yanked her up and chomped down hard on her screaming face.

"JUST FUCKING DIE!!" the last caravaneer, a lanky and hairless young man in leathers came up behind him and slammed a bladed baseball bat into his side. He instantly dropped the dead woman before he could chew with a yell. Dogmeat leaped up and tore into the man's elbow. He shouted in pain and the struggle ripped the jagged weapon from Strong's flesh.

"Stop hurting Strong!" Strong recovered and grabbed an arm, yanked the man up, and twisted him like a rope while he screamed in pain and terror. He shoved two fingers into the man's mouth and tore the lower jaw right off of his face. The man's agonized screams burned into Ruby's ears as he slowly drowned in his own blood. "Look at me as you die!" Strong glared at him until he finally went limp.

Once satisfied, Strong was bored again and noticed that Dogmeat was still dangling from his kill, playfully growling and tugging like the dumb dog he was. He lifted the corpse upward and Dogmeat held fast even as his back legs left the ground far behind.

"Dog good at biting. Strong impressed!" Strong pointed and turned back to Ruby, who stood stiff as a statue with her trembling hands rattling her shotgun. He blinked his good eye at her with confusion. "What is it human?"

"Oh - Nothing." She realized that her weapon was pointed at him and she lowered it.

"Feh." Strong frowned tiredly and dropped the body. Dogmeat landed with a yelp, but got up from the fall unharmed. Meanwhile Strong helped himself to the piled multitude of crates and barrels on the pack brahmin, which was still floundering on the ground in it's final throws. He laughed at it. The hairs on the back of Ruby's neck stood up and her face started to run hot with anger.

"That's enough!" She stomped up and put a slug in the poor beast's forehead. Once the first head was dropped, she realized that she had to double tap because the other head spooked. She turned back to Strong, who was now tossing away clothing, chemicals, a desk fan and a telephone with increasingly angered grumbles. Then he found a big metal box and shook it. Evidently by the sound of clattering metal it was the ammunition stash. Without any hesitation he brought the whole thing over to Ruby.  
"Dead not need. We take!"

Ruby barely had enough time to shoulder her shotgun before he dropped it right into her arms. The metal box landed heavily and it's awkward size made for a clumsy catch. Her struggle knocked her shades down and she stood there staring at him in surprise. Strong was already ignoring her and back to digging through the rest of the loot. Ruby one-armed the ammo box and pushed her glasses back up. She watched him carelessly rip containers free and tear them open one by one. Then she put the ammo box down with haste, knowing better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. She knelt to open it. It was locked. No wonder these people put up such a piss poor fight.

She quietly rose and approached the scattered remains of the caravan. She kept her eyes on Strong, only glancing down to check for keys on the bodies. He found a sack full of tatos and greedily stuffed a handful in his mouth before setting the rest down and dumping open a rug filled with unloaded firearms. Ruby finally found a ring of keys on the big woman's belt, but on the way back she saw the multitude of discarded necessities scattered among the corpses. She unconsciously helped herself to the duffle bag filled with medicine, those clean socks, the cast iron frying pan, and the sleeping bag. Then finally, she saw the 44 magnum revolver still clenched in the old man's hand. She pried it free and then stepped over to work the heavy leather gun belt off his lower half. She donned that belt and started taking the mismatched armor off the others, checking each piece for size.

"Leave human junk! Not need!" Strong looked up from the collection of long barreled firearms.

"It's not junk to me, Strong!" Ruby jumped at the sound of his voice and used it to shout back at him. Strong genuinely looked a little surprised. "Like you'd know the difference anyway!" she blew him off and finished stripping the jaw-less man of his road leathers. Strong found another metal lock box and shook it. It also made that tumbling metal racket, but it was slightly different than the previous. He tried to pry it open with his fingers, which kept slipping off the seam of the lid. After a few tries, Strong spiked the whole thing down hard with an angry grunt, denting a corner and the pavement, but failed to break it open. Huffing furiously he grabbed a chunk of concrete off the ground and started hitting it repeatedly until Ruby slyly spoke up.

"Hold up, I've got an idea." She smirked.

"What is idea, human?" Strong moved aside with frustration as she approached with her head held high.

"I think this thing might work." She showed him the keys around her wrist. "You do remember what keys are, right?"

"Shut up!" Strong snapped at her, but didn't raise a hand. She bent down and coyly let him watch over her shoulder. She tried a few keys on the lock until it clicked and turned. She grinned at the sound and effortlessly opened the case. It was filled with battered old bottle caps.

"BAH! Just more human junk!" Strong moved on. She filled her pockets with the currency, consoling herself with the solemn resolution that if these people really were peaceful traders worthy of survival, they would have avoided the super mutant instead of thoughtlessly shooting him in the back with a fucking pipe pistol. Every native to this world would have known that would just piss him off.

For the rest of that day, Ruby continued to string him along under the pretense of helping him find the the milk of human kindness, shuddering at the thought of bringing him anywhere near a human settlement. He was enthralled by a high powered sniper rifle because it fit in his hands better than his old one. He didn't understand the point of the scope, so Ruby had to stop him from just snapping it off. He listened only because it was a human weapon, and she was now the expert at his beckon call. Otherwise he ignored her and continued on his quest. He also kept ignoring those bleeding wounds, leaving them unwashed and exposed until they gradually closed and scabbed up over the course of just a few hours. She envied him.

"Human sound tired." He noticed her huffing along behind him and paused. He turned his head and gave her a sour once over. "Human not look hurt..."

"I'm fine, Strong." The load on her back probably did weigh at least a hundred pounds, but she had already sorted it all and discarded more than she wanted to.

"Strong not understand why human take garbage." Without a second thought, he took the heavy ruck sack from her and the roped jugs of water along with it. Ruby had no hope of stopping him, so she let it happen and figured she would just pick it back up again after he threw it away. But to her surprise, he slung it over his shoulder along with the bundled weaponry and the choice meat of the caravan like the day's catch. He smoothly turned back around and moved on. After a moment or two of shock, Ruby finally blinked and started jogging after him and Dogmeat.

The problem with stringing him along was that he knew these urban ruins better than she did. She knew her way around Boston back in the time before, but now everything was collapsed and two hundred years of undocumented history had passed her by. Strong had lived here for years at least, and seemed at home as a boar in the woods. He knew where all the ghouls tended to gather, since his kind would leave them be in favor of the much better tasting meat. He also ignored other super mutant camps, having already eliminated them as possible locations of the milk. Though he voiced that he would rather be with his brothers than with her numerous times.

He was also easily distracted by gunfire and explosions. He was never scared, but he would drop everything to follow the sound, expecting that there would be human prey at the source. Hot on the trail of his favorite food, he would obliviously drag her through pockets of intense radiation and monster nests because he was still carrying all of her stuff. He wouldn't go near the Boston Common, however – something about a 'swan smash'. She didn't know what that meant, but he was obviously cowed by whatever hellish monstrosity lurked there, so she took his word for it.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Another day and two nights passed. Still no Diamond City. Strong babbled on about how he would find the milk of human kindness and drink it, making super mutants stronger than humans so they could wipe every other living thing off the face of the earth. Then some giant insects or a rabid, mutated animal would pop out and he would just stand back and laugh at Ruby while she and the dog fought them off.

That first night after the daily raider hunt, Strong threw that sniper rifle on the ground because it had jammed and he thought it was broken. Ruby picked it up, pried the empty casing from the chamber and test fired at a protruding street sign some thousand yards away. It was a clean and satisfying shot that cracked through the air and echoed off the old buildings like thunder. It's high caliber round penetrated the sign and the brick wall behind it as indicated by the puff of masonry dust. Strong gawked at her as though she were some kind of sorceress when she handed it back to him.

When he finally did nod off on the second night, she tried to ditch him in a heartbeat, but the dog woke him up like he was part of the team. She had to make an excuse – some bullshit about scouting ahead, and it just got harder on her from there. She fought sleep, was running low on drinking water and her first aid was empty again. She now suffered untreated radiation sickness, withdrawal, plus a bullet wound in her shoulder and a mole rat bite on her ankle. She rinsed and dressed those wounds with the best of her ability, but they were still oozing and possibly infected now. Meanwhile Strong was perfectly at home, carelessly gorging himself on the fat of this post-nuclear wasteland, all the while consistently berating her frailty and jumpiness, and scolding her whenever she dug around in trash for a few meager scraps of metal and glue to repair her arsenal. He was loudly fed up with her at all times, but she forced herself to take it in stride like she was made of sterner stuff because he still fed her and carried her stuff. His kind didn't seem to have much concept of personal property. He shared everything he had and expected the same from her; simply taking anything he needed from her or otherwise announcing when he needed something so she knew to hand it over. In numerous circumstances she was too weak and he wanted to leave her behind, but he was still convinced that he needed her help to find that milk of human kindness. The exact nature of the help she would give him in that respect must have never crossed his mind.

Then Dogmeat sniffed out some performance-enhancing drugs, and she praised him for being such a supportive and loving enabler. She could never hope to match Strong's limitless durability and strength, but she could at least outpace him when push would inevitably come to shove.

She tried looping back around and taking him with her to the police station where Danse and his unit were, thinking that she could get them to kill each other and be back on her way. They spotted Strong a long way off and opened fire like she thought they would. Strong returned fire and started running at them like he always did, and the trained soldiers shot him full of lazer blasts that actually did some real damage. Then Dogmeat ran out in front of him and Ruby couldn't help herself.

"Paladin Danse! It's me!! Don't shoot my dog!!" She ran shouting into the fray waving her arms like a mad woman. Strong, still smoking from laser burns, stopped in his tracks to look at her strange behavior and the soldiers did the same. Paladin Danse eyed her and Strong with contempt while she caught her breath. Dogmeat took a seat in the center of both factions, wagging his tail and looking around at everyone with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

To keep everyone friendly Ruby then had to pretend she had changed her mind about enlisting in the Brotherhood of Steel. She made sure to emphasize being in it solely for the resources she needed to find her son. Danse happily accepted. Then of course, she had to stand there and be lectured by her new C.O. for 'running with this ... abomination.'

"With all do respect, sir, I'm not running with Strong. He's working for me." she instinctively shot back.

"Strong not work for anyone! Strong work for Strong! Human help Strong find milk of-kaaaggggng!"

Ruby had never once thought of using that shock baton on Strong until now. In this moment, she was both amazed and greatly satisfied at how effective it was. His angry voice crumpled as his entire body seized and he stiffly dropped to his knees. The impact of his weight shook the ground, but he refused to fall any further. Knight Ryse thought that seeing Strong on his knees grimacing and catching his breath was the best thing ever.

"Ha! How does that feel, Mutie?" He chortled.

"Shut the fuck up, white boy!" Ruby abruptly pointed the shock baton at him. That alabaster man-child reminded her a little too much of someone she'd been trying to bury since childhood. But upon locking her wrathful glare upon him she realized that she shouldn't have said that, or taken her eyes off of Strong.

"What did you just call me?" Knight Ryse lunged forward, causing Dogmeat to counter with some angry barking and Scribe Halen to dart out and restrain her compatriot.

"Enough!" Danse shouted and all were instantly silent. "I will not tolerate this kind of bickering! Ryse, Halen, give the new recruit her orders! And you - " he pointed that wide-eyed righteous frown squarely at Ruby with the same intensity one would expect from a peewee football coach. "The fact that you gave that thing a name is beyond me, soldier. But if you don't keep your pets under control, I will not hesitate to put them down myself, do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal clear, sir." Ruby snapped to attention. If only he would try.

"Excellent. Dismissed." And he spun around to go back inside and read the book of Mormon or whatever it was he did all day.

Strong by now was back up on his feet and staring daggers at Ruby. His perpetually angry mask of a face now scrunched into an even more deeply wrinkled brow, squinted eyes and a jutting frown. "Strong not like what human do."

"You can't be telling everybody our business, Strong!" Ruby hissed at him, still running high on making him hurt for once. But now she could feel the soldiers eyes on her. She kicked herself and scrambled to think of how she could get out of this mess. Sadly, Strong was the best ally that she had at the moment, having demonstrated that he cared enough not to loose his shit and kill her just then. She yanked down hard on Strong's wrist, trying to get him to stoop a little. The first tug did nothing as though she were pulling on the branch of a tree, but she kept at it with increasing effort.

"Human not tell Strong what to do! Strong -! What is it, human?"

"Get the fuck down here, stupid!" the fifth time he finally got it and leaned in so that she could get to his ear. "These guys know where the milk is." she whispered harshly.

"Oh?" Strong's brow lifted dumbly, obviously unfamiliar with the concept of whispering. "Strong not know."

"Yeah. They won't tell a super mutant like you where it is, but they might tell me because I'm a human, so just shut up and pretend I'm the leader, okay?"

"Okay. Good idea human." Strong nodded and straightened, casually stepping aside to let her deal with the gawking knight and scribe. She walked over to them as stoically as she could muster, too caught up in following through to even think about how ridiculous that exchange might have looked.

 

~

 

Back on the road, Strong was free to think he could order Ruby around again. In fact, once they were out of sight, Strong swatted Ruby with the back of his forearm and laughed at her as she tumbled over the side of the road and into a ditch. Dogmeat dove down after her with a playful bark as she shook it off.

"PAIN STICK FOR ENEMIES! NOT STRONG!" He bellowed down at her.

"Okay! I'm sorry!" She stood and dusted herself off, her appreciation of his relative restraint keeping her grounded for the moment. She rejoined him on the road with Dogmeat close behind. "But you have to believe me, those soldiers are just part of a much bigger army that has us out manned and out gunned! We don't stand a chance if they decide to attack us!"

Looking up at Strong's big dumb face made her suspect that she was yelling at a brick wall. Fuck it. The fact of the matter was that he had just openly told her that he wasn't her enemy.

"Look, I'm sorry. It won't happen again." She offered up her right hand to him.

Strong looked at her flat open hand, perplexed.

"Pain stick for enemies. Not Strong. I promise." She repeated his words, legitimately wanting to bury that hatchet. It took days in the wilderness for her to realize that compared to Strong, most human beings were unbelievably selfish. She looked him straight in the eye with fervor and again presented that open hand. He slowly raised his right hand, mirroring the gesture. He kept looking back and forth with a furrowed brow between her hand and her face, and she did her best not to give into her nerves. He carefully closed his massive, calloused palm around hers and then abruptly jerked her forward with a force that could have snapped her neck. He pressed her forehead against his so that his green bloodshot eyes burned directly through her mirrored shades. He blasted her with a nose-full of hot breath and Ruby started making her peace with God.

"Break promise, and Strong break YOU." And with that he released her, sending her stumbling backward until she landed hard on her backside. Then in a split second his tone switched back to dumb caveman.

"Which way human?" He asked flatly and looked down at her. He waited a few seconds for her to reply. Then some random noise inaudible to her caused him to casually turn and listen, his eyes slowly and deliberately scanning for any show of movement in the landscape. Dogmeat joined him in the search, standing still but sniffing the air.

 

~

 

Following the busted road southward again, Ruby scoured those Brotherhood orders for any lead on any missing people or unsolved murders. But there weren't any. Just intel on where to acquisition technology and a few strategic locations that had been taken over by 'subhuman trash'. Seems that for all their talk about humanity's best interest, they saw no benefit in actually helping any of the people in the wasteland in any meaningful way.

The densest part of downtown Boston was barely recognizable. She literally had no idea what to look for, save for the vague descriptor, 'the great green jewel of the commonwealth'. For all she knew, Diamond city was only accessible via twister.

"Bucket heads worthy of Strong. Kill many brothers." Strong hoisted her up by the waist. Then let her climb off of him and onto a street light.

"Bunch of armored bullies, if you ask me." Ruby clambered up the remainder of the pole and seated herself with her legs crossed around the lamp. Feeling more free with the big dumb ape than she did with any of the human beings she had met thus far, she let herself speak her mind. "Trust me, I helped those guys clear an R&D building the other day."

"Humans should help humans. More fun to kill that way."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. But you know they took all the stuff we found for themselves and the only thing they would share was one lazer pistol that they didn't need anyway. It's like they expect everything they see to just bend over and spread their butt cheeks for em like it's a privilege." she swung that sniper rifle around by the strap and pointed the scope out into the distance, looking for a yellow brick road among the scorched ruins.

"Why bucket heads put pri-vah-lidge in everything's butts?"

"That's not what I said Strong."

"Humans talk too much! Strong share milk of human kindness with brothers, then kill bucket heads and take all lazer guns."

 

~

 

She finally spotted a hastily posted wooden plank with a white wash diamond shape painted on it followed by an arrow. She slung the rifle over her shoulder and slid down the pole, figuring she might be on the right track. Her new traveling buddy predictably scared every guard and drifter on the way up to the old Fenway Park baseball stadium, but he behaved himself. He must have accepted that Ruby was the defacto leader whenever non-hostile humans were involved.

Just across from the statue there was a chem-addicted gun dealer who called Strong 'hot stuff' and asked if he wanted to buy some 'boom-booms'. That was weird, but god damn the bitch had the best selection of precision, military grade boom-booms. Some of them were in close to pristine condition. Ruby spent all of her caps in less than five minutes because Cricket, though obviously tripping balls, wasn't screaming and shooting at them. Plus, she was the realest bitch ever when she told Ruby that if she didn't buy from her, her enemies would.

The front gates were shut tight, but a recently exiled (presumably for being annoying) reporter girl enlisted Ruby in her attempt to talk their way into gaining entrance. Once inside, Ruby found the fabled Diamond City to be nothing more than a cloistered ghetto hiding behind those towering walls. Having been told that the milk might be there, Strong refused to wait outside, and so made it a very awkward entrance to the open fairway.

When they all finally gathered that Strong was peacefully lumbering in line between a heavily armed woman and her German Shepard dog like a beast of burden, the townsfolk stopped gaping and cautiously went back to their usual business. The detective agency they were looking for per Piper's direction was tucked away in an alley. The door was too small for Strong to fit through, so he seated himself just outside while Ruby and Dogmeat went in. She found that it was empty save for the grieving secretary. She told her that the detective had gone missing while out on a case and that the mayor wouldn't spare any men to find him. Already having had the pleasure of meeting that sweaty used car salesman, Ruby offered to go look for the detective herself. The secretary dried her tears and sent her off with his case file.

Strong had a bottle thrown at him and his face was dripping with beer when Ruby emerged. There was a handful of local men standing around that were still jeering and voicing a few choice words at him until he got up and shrugged the glass off. At which point they shoved their hands in their pockets and speed walked away in a cluster. Strong didn't even bat an eye. He asked Ruby if she found the milk and she had to explain that no she didn't, but the lady inside said it was underground somewhere. Strong accepted that and followed her back out into the town square. He was more than capable of cutting everyone down like a field of wheat, and his confidence showed in his behavior. Though he constantly was on the look out and examining everything in his path, he only reacted to Ruby or Dogmeat. Even as the taunting from the village folk became more and more ballsy and even cruel. After the third bottle had been smashed against his head and the kids were following him with sticks, he finally started to show that he was out of his element here. In the way he kept his head down and his arms pinned to the straps of the load on his back, Ruby got the impression that he may have been getting a little claustrophobic. She knew this feeling.

Ruby made her way around in search of good barter for all the junk she was making Strong carry. First she felt the need to correct the 'swatter' dealer in his retelling of how they used to play baseball in days of yore. For whatever reason he thought that baseball involved beating people to death with bats.

She stepped up to a merchant who flat out refused to do business because she 'might be a synth'. With so many armored guards around, Ruby chose to walk away and instead trade her entire set of raider armor for a metal chest piece and all her junk for a fat man at the 'self defense' place next door. She let Strong hold the thing, but quickly had to remind him not to shoot it off right then and there. Then suddenly she saw a guy point a gun at his own brother in the street, thinking _he_ was a synth.

Then a cop shot him point blank in the head after a half-heated attempt to pacify him. There was no investigation, no questions. They didn't even try to administer aid or move the body. Everyone just glazed over like that kind of medieval shepherding of the the malnourished and illiterate populace happened all the goddamned time. There was definitely something fishy going on, but Ruby honestly didn't care enough. She had no hope of solving anything that was going on here without more violence, and certainly not without taking responsibility for another rabble of helpless sheep after the fact.

She was honestly disappointed that Diamond City was the crowning achievement of human survival in the entire commonwealth after more than two hundred years. In her time, by the bicentennial birthday of the Unites States of America, Boston was a modern city with skyscrapers and was home to millions of people. She found it very hard to believe that life was so hard that they could barely make it out of the dark ages despite having a head start with all the miracle drugs, high tech weaponry, and fully intact industrial equipment just lying around. Given that the there were parts of the landscape still thick with deadly ionizing radiation, the bombs must have packed an incredible punch. Most radioactive particles have a thirty year half life at most, so by scientific logic, the radiation should have completely dissipated less than a century later. Perhaps the nuclear fusion cores that powered everything back then somehow contained a miracle of modern technology that allowed them to continuously recycle their own spent nuclear fuel. But that would mean that humanity had invented a limitless free energy source and the resource wars shouldn't have come to a head. Any further speculation was beyond Ruby's faculties.

These people must have been the culmination of successive generations of individuals so damaged, that they defied the plausibilities of life and death. Most people here were dirty, abusive and lethargic shells of human beings, and she had yet to see more than a handful of children or obviously pregnant women. It reminded her of the trailer trash she left behind in Indiana, but even those people were relatively fat and healthy and sometimes the kids would be taken into foster care if their parents drank themselves to death. She couldn't fathom what it must have been like for the survivors of the immediate aftermath of the war. Two hundred years of desperation, trauma, infighting and abuse had quite literally pulled humanity back to the stone age; their meager lives now laid out before the mercy of mega-fauna and the elements. Monstrosities like Strong were the rulers of the new wilderness sprouting up outside these walls, and these people were just too pitiful to even try to take it all back. Instead they seemed more concerned with rebuilding the veil of civilization based on the glowing adverts that survived the war. Instead of fabricating their own clothing, they wore tattered and desintigrating hand-me-downs from 200 years ago. And despite having a mutruit orchard, they all ate either noodles with water or irradiated two hundred year old dry goods. Even their social structure was an arbitrary class system ripped out of a shitty pulp noir where they had 'rich' people living in the upper stands and a police force that pretty much only served theor interests, which seemed mainly to just sit around and look down on everyone else regardless of the fact that they all lived in they same dump.

Piper filled her in on the goings on even though she never asked. 'The institute' as of late was cranking out much more lifelike humanoid robots than the clanking and twitching hunks of plastic that she had seen in Arcjet. Once more they were supposedly replacing people with them. It sounded like a bunch of paranoid hysteria bullshit, but the institute was reportedly responsible for supermutants as well. Deadly radiation, monsters, crazed lunatics and now an ever-present evil underground conglomerate to wrap this shit hole up in a nice bow.

Ruby felt something rough punch against her face and she reflexively sucked air in through her nose from the shock of it. She took a moment to gather herself and found that she was indoors and sitting at a table just opposite Piper, who was holding a pencil and paper in her hands and looking straight at her with an expression of concern. Complete with worrisome eyes and the slight biting of her lower lip. Ruby had no idea how she got there or what was going on.

She now felt something warm and wet on her face. Dogmeat had elevated himself, his front paws on her lap, and was whimpering nervously and frantically licking one side of her face, but she had not noticed until Strong had given her a good poke in the opposing cheek with one of his gnarled fingers. She turned to him and he had an oddly innocent look of pure curiosity on his craggy face.

"How'd you get in here? I thought you couldn't fit through the door..."

"Stupid man piss on Strong. Strong decide to fit."

"Hey, are you okay, blue?" Piper's furrowed brow and slight sneer indicated a guarded but genuine concern. "You zonked out on me for a second there."

"Yeah. Sorry, Piper. Where were we?" Ruby rubbed Dogmeat's head as he relaxed and rested his chin on her lap.

Piper took a quick moment to review her latest scribbles on that paper. "You were saying that when you woke up in the vault, it was just you and a thousand carnivorous guinea pigs? Is that correct?"

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

By the fourth day without sleep, Ruby's hallucinations had come back – she heard voices, ghost ordinances, Shaun crying from some unreachable place, and saw little black things scurrying all around around. She began to rely on the dog, constantly keeping him in arms reach so she could catch an ear swivel or see his dousing rod of a hound nose pointing at anything. Despite often getting underfoot, he had become a great treasure to her; a reminder that a way to survive and thrive existed here. If a dog, especially a working breed cultivated to serve, could carve out a space in this hellish environment, it was an even greater miracle that after countless generations they remained unchanged from the long forgotten time of posh kennels and selective breeding. It gave her almost paralyzing hope.

"What is Shaun?" Strong broke the silence.

"Shaun?" Ruby looked up at him from across the campfire.

"Strong hear human say it many times. Human say, must find Shaun."

Ruby took a moment to calm herself. She realized that she told everyone but Strong, figuring he wouldn't care anyway.

"Shaun is the name of my son."

Strong kept staring into her face, as though he were waiting for more. Ruby took another breath.

"He's just a baby. Someone took him from me."

"Small human dead."

"I DON'T CARE STRONG! I MUST FIND HIM!"

Strong's brow raised in apparent surprise.

"WHAT?!" Ruby was tired of people looking at her like she was insane for doing what any mother would do.

"Human act like deathclaw with small ones. Act like that more. Win more fights that way."

"..." this time she stared blankly at him. A pearl of wisdom from a super mutant was a strange looking pearl indeed.

"But small human still dead. Look for milk with Strong instead."

"I hate you."

"HA!"

 

~

 

Meanwhile her head and body ached incessantly and she was perpetually on the edge of puking her guts out. These drugs were the fucking tits though. She had no concept of how they were made, perhaps it involved quantum mechanics or some other wizardry. They had the power to rebuild her threadbare DNA in perfect sequence so that every cell in her body basically got a hard restart without the need for immediate termination. A brilliant set of concoctions that would have led to curing all disease and even immortality if not for the war.

She was needing to pop, huff and shoot up almost hourly to keep herself on her feet and looking forward. She couldn't walk ten feet with Strong's big dumb ass stomping along without a care in the goddamned world. Every bloodthirsty shit bag within earshot would come down on them with damn near suicidal prejudice. Then Strong would trumpet a war cry and blindly sprint right out toward them. Sometimes he would step on a frag mine and he'd be down until the fight was over. Then the dog would get over excited and take off in another random direction. Ruby was then left to dive for cover and frantically shoot at every window, door and crack in every building for enemies that she couldn't see or risk getting hit with a crippling injury. This wasted a lot of ammunition, as well as first aid because she always got shot at least three times, and Dogmeat always got shot at least once and kept getting pistol whipped hanging off of raiders' arms. Then after it was all over, Strong would laugh at her for being weak and scared and give her shit about wasting what was left of her precious medicines on the dog instead of just putting him out of his misery and eating him. Ruby was never one to take sass from anyone anyhow, but since she made a promise not to stun baton him again, she was left with just yelling at him about how it wouldn't kill him to walk more carefully every now and again.

"HA! Only weakling humans need sneak!" Strong proclaimed upon her suggestion.

"Excuse me, but how else do you think I popped all twenty of your brothers' heads back at the tower?!" She demanded, chest out, hands on her hips and using her courtroom voice.

"...use gun?" Strong blinked at her, then off in to space, creasing his brow with the effort of thinking.

"Oh yeah, that's right. You're a fucking retarded-ass trash monster! It's really no wonder everything under the sun gets the drop on you!"

"Why sun drop on Strong?" He squinted up at it.

"God DAMMIT! That's it! I'm done!" she threw up her hands and turned to leave him.

"Done with what?"

"You can take your milk of human kindness and shove it up your ass!" she kept walking.

"Why should Strong put milk in ass?" Strong followed her. "That how to drink it? Humans put things in asses a lot..."

Needless to say, she started drinking raider booze to try and take the edge off.

By day six she had looted a comic book store and found herself a double headed steel ax that felt good in the hands. It felt even better to hack those fucking bitch ghouls to bits with it, so she sharpened it and lept at any and every opportunity to fucking murder anything else that got in her way. Those people that took her baby were fucking dead. If it didn't move right it was fucking dead. Dogmeat stuck with her because he was a good boy, and Strong strangely gave her less trouble after seeing her ignore getting shot in the stomach and cleave a man's skull like a melon just because it felt that good.

Using words to argue with Strong had turned out to be a waste of time. She instead learned where his tender spots were in order to get his attention. He wasn't too different from a human being; his sides, in particular the ribs just under his arms had slightly thinner skin, so she could jab him there with four stiffened fingers and he would feel it. She gathered from the arrangement of his armor that his lower abs and groin were probably vulnerable as well. He peed standing up, so there had to be some gonads under there. If only the opportunity to test the effectiveness of a swift kick would present itself.

She came to expect every building and sinkhole to be lousy with some kind of rabid animal or poisonous insect, or a cluster of glowing zombies, or a crazed robot left over from the war, or fucking anything at this point. Whenever Dogmeat's ears slicked back, or he pointed, she knew to duck down because something was there. If he growled it was an enemy, if not, he had found something else. Strong as it turned out had pretty sharp senses as well, but he tended to focus them more for the purpose of killing and looting than avoiding danger. He wasn't bothered by radiation or disease, and most enemies didn't stand a chance against him. But he constantly complained about hunger. He absolutely had to eat every four hours and was never truly satisfied with anything smaller than a person. He would eat an entire person, bones and all if there was just the one. It must have been the price he paid for being able to shake off bullet wounds in minutes.

When it came to sniper fire, Ruby could triangulate their hiding places based on the patterning of their rounds on Strong's body. Once locked on, she would lob a grenade in that direction and run off from the group in order to flank them. The explosion usually made quick work of them, but she always had to clear the area herself just in case it didn't. Magnum rounds were hard to come by, so they usually got a shotgun shell to the face, a knife in the gut, or got hacked up with an ax if she was worked up enough.

Once fully saturated in the blood of her enemies, Ruby would return to her team and give Dogmeat a belly rub for being so sharp. Then she would punch the fuck out of Strong's kidneys with the butt of her shotgun, or drop him by kicking in the back of his knee for starting the whole thing and making her finish it _again_. Soon Strong learned never to turn his back on her again.

Clearing and then taking their breaks in raider camps became the regular routine. They would pile the bodies up in the center, then sort the loot. They occasionally had something useful, but the pickings seemed to get slimmer as time went on. In fact, she recognized many of the items as her own discard. For people that thought they were big and bad, they sure lacked initiative. Ruby would lounge in one of their decaying couches or lawn chairs and read their porno while Strong ate their bodies and bundled up what he couldn't finish for later. The pre-war girly mags were too crumbly and brown to read, so she ended up mostly looking at hand drawn erotica that was entertaining purely out of it's absurdity. They were crudely drawn and depicted gang rapes and torture mostly, but they didn't lack charm in a twisted way. She still fought the urge to sleep, forever expecting Strong to get bored and forget about their agreements at any time.

~

Ruby was shaken out of a harsh buzzing blackness by a loud clang. Then brought back to the physical plane by a booming gravely voice.  
"Strong hungry too! Save some for Strong!"

She was kneeling on the groin of a young man, pinning him on his back while he screamed in agony for her hands were elbow deep in his guts. She tasted blood in her mouth and felt the wetness of it all over her face. Her eyes met those of her victim, helplessly pleading her with unintelligible gurgles. This wasn't a faceless enemy in a gas mask. He was a lost and scared human being. Like that pimply high school kid that bagged her groceries at the market. The absence of any sound aside from the boy's tormented spluttering started buzzing in her head, then came the disembodied whispers again.  
"Sure, Strong." Finally she took out her kabar and gave that kid a small amount of dignity by plunging the six inch blade through his forehead. Then she dismounted him and stood up. She saw that her ax was lying a few feet away on a metal platform and went for it, leaving the meat for Strong to enjoy without guilt.

She numbly stumbled around the smoke filled manufacturing complex for a short while following her path of destruction. The dingy fire-lit rooms were lined in fresh, bright red spatters of viscera and peppered with bullet holes. Limp and shredded bodies lie scattered on the floor and hanging from catwalks. She tried to remember where she was and what had transpired. From the looks of it it was an auto factory that was home to a very large raider gang. And yes, they were causing trouble for some newly recruited settlers just to the north of here. Thank god for that pip boy, as it was keeping her on task like a second brain that wasn't affected by sleepless nights, drugs and alcohol. Although it did annoy her to find that she had side-tracked a half day's walk from the detective's last known location. She caught a glint of reflective surface walking past a trash fire and turned to see a reflection of herself in a dusty plexiglass window. She stopped to look closer, realizing that she hadn't looked at herself since before she was frozen. Her chocolate brown skin and blue vault suit looked the same color of flat pitch save for the glistening of blood and sweat on her face and hands. Removing her aviators for a better look, she blinked initially in the flickering firelight. Leaning into the reflection she noticed an obvious banding of lighter color around her eyes where the glasses had been. She lifted her cover and discovered a similar happenstance underneath; the filth stopped just short of her hairline, outlining where the cap had been. She set out to find water.  
  
  


She stepped out into a clear day, and found a pond near the industrial waste runoff that ran dry hundreds of years ago. She didn't care if it was still polluted, everything was fucking polluted. She unfastened her armor piece by piece and then unzipped her vault suit. Once completely naked, she took a bar of soap out of her pack and carried her wadded up clothing with her into the water. If their were any thieving, raping raiders around, she was quite confident that they were all lying on the ground rotting and being eaten.

The water was cold but it felt heavenly after days in the heat and dust. She took her time scrubbing off and dunking herself, rinsing plumes of soap and dirt into the water upon rising out again. She threw her unders over her shoulder and started scrubbing her vault suit. By the time she had just started to see blue again, the dog found her and jumped right in, splashing her whole upper body with that cold water, causing her to reflexively suck in a loud gasp.

"You dirty son of a bitch!" she smiled as he paddled around in the waist deep water. "Come here! Lemme get some soap on you!" She playfully grabbed him and started scrubbing his fur with that soap. He returned the attention with earnest licking of her face. When she was getting in between his scraped up little dog toes, she noticed Strong treading heavily up to the shore out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head toward him, squinting tightly from the soapy water and glinting sunlight, forgetting that she was still in the buff.

"Everything okay, Strong?" She seriously wondered why he wasn't still looting the place.

"What human doing?" He cocked his head back slightly as if in disgust.

"I'm taking a bath. Care to join?" she knew he didn't and cared not to see him undressed anyway, but asking was the polite thing to do.

"Humans take bath, not Super mutants." Strong scoffed, looking at her and then the edge of the pond with some reservation.

"Why? You guys don't like water?"

"Water for drinking." He frowned even harder than usual and turned to leave.

"You're scared of the water, aren't you." Ruby grinned.

"Strong not scared of anything!" he spun back and shouted squarely in her direction.

"Okay! I believe you." Ruby shrugged. Now that her face was starting to relax, she noticed that Strong was a little wobbly and clamping a wound on his upper arm. Blood was spurting through his fingers; the heavy flow of red streamed down that hanging arm and poured steadily onto the dirt at this feet. She had seen him hit with just about everything from bullets to saw blades, but no matter how deep the would was, he always ignored it completely. This must have been the closest he'd ever been to loosing a limb.

"Hey, what happened to your arm?" She fished her clothing out of the water and started wading towards him.

"Strong get in the way." He eyed her suspiciously as she came out of the water and reached for him, but did nothing to stop her. Dogmeat followed her to the shore and shook himself dry. Strong recoiled from the water spraying him in the face and nearly lost his balance just as she had come within arm's reach. She reflexively pushed back on him. For the split second it took for Strong to right himself, she felt his entire weight on her and feared being crushed to death.

Strong shook his head and blinked a few times while she braved his swaying bulk and moved around to his arm. His hide was wet with sweat and cool to the touch and that hot blood was rhythmically pumping out with his heartbeat. She coaxed his clamped fingers away and his arm fell open, spilling a pint of blood onto her in that instant. It was a clean, broad slice through Strong's skin, fat and muscle all the way down to the chipped bone like a spiral cut ham. She was taken aback by the severity of the injury even though she had inflicted similar, if not worse, on others. Then it dawned on her that she had done this to him. She couldn't remember anything but she was almost certain of it. Her chest tightened with guilt, knowing that this whole time he had never given her more than a deep bruise even though he was more than capable of tearing her limb from limb. Meanwhile, he was loosing gallons of blood and he couldn't move that arm, but he wrote it off as being his own fault and was making a conscious effort to ignore it the way he ignored all his injuries.

"I- ... Let me help you with this!" she backed away momentarily to grab a stimpak. She rummaged around in her supplies until she found what she was looking for.

  
"Why human help Strong? Strong not human!" Strong looked on as Ruby returned with a stimpak and jabbed him hard on the shoulder with it.

"I help everyone Strong." She pressed the open wound together as best she could while it healed. "I have a problem."

"Hrmmmm..." Strong nodded thoughtfully.

~

They made camp for the night just outside the factory. Strong plucked a dead tree from the hardened ground for a bonfire. The tall flames lit up a large expanse of the clearing and provided good heat to dry Ruby's vault suit and unders as they lay spread flatly on a steel drum. Evidently female nudity was nothing new or particularly enticing to Strong. It was strangely liberating to be bare skinned in the open air without judgment. She laid out her sleeping bag and sat cross legged on it while she roasted her dinner on a stick over the burning wood fire. In the warmth of it all she was finding it harder than ever to fight sleep.

Properly cooked, Ruby found that human flesh reminded her of a shoulder cut pork steak. She felt more than guilty for enjoying it. The dog enjoyed it too, but he was a dumb dog and he treated everything she gave him like it was mana from heaven. Strong was already on his third body, enjoying the tender innards after Ruby had insisted that no, she didn't want any. Not liking the taste of human waste aside, Strong was obviously starving.

"Strong learn new word – respect." He told her between chomps.

"Yeah?" Ruby was prepared for him to not know what respect actually meant. "Where from?"

"You say to Strong. And to other humans."

"Oh..." Ruby was prepared for the worst. "Yeah."

"You say ' _I ay-no bitch! How bout some mu-tha-fuckin respect?'_ Then kill!" He crudely retold the incidence with his hands, first pointing forcefully upward as she must have and then pounded his chest on that last part. Then he hunched back down to meet Ruby's stunned face at her level.

"Human good fighter. Almost as good as super mutant! Strong give mu-tha-fuckin respect." Strong's normally hard and beady eyes now looked at her almost the same way the dog did.

"That's uh... thank you Strong." Ruby started choking up, not from the joy of being accepted, but from shame. "I respect you too."

"Of course. Strong is strong!"

"Yeah..."

He went back to eating and she looked at the ground in silence, unsure of how she felt. She stared into the flames, numbly weighing the pros and cons of being worthy of a super mutant's respect.

"Hope we find milk of human kindness soon."

Ruby thought that she could just keep letting him believe that bullshit indefinitely, but some part of her knew that she was in too deep to keep on. She damned her woman's heart.

"Strong, now that we're friends, I think it's time I set you straight."

"What is not straight on Strong, human?"

She took a deep breath. "About the milk of human kindness... It's not something that you can find and drink."

"What?" Strong's eyes widened and he froze, which universally indicated that a bubble had been burst. "But Mac Beth say milk make humans stronger than super mutants! Why can't Strong drink milk?!" he lunged forward angrily. Dogmeat instantly flattened his body as much as he could. Ruby balled up and almost peed.

"I-i-it's not like that, Strong! It's a figure of speech! Humans can't drink it either! I swear!"

"What is 'fig-yer of speech?' Strong confused." His heated breathing started to slow.

"A figure of speech is words that mean something else. And Macbeth isn't real either. He's just a made up story."

"Made up?" Strong scratched his head and furrowed his brow, still eyeing Ruby with confusion that could turn to homicidal anger any second. "What are straight words, human? Tell Strong now!"

Ruby took a second to get her wits about her. Apparently the very concept of fiction was beyond Strong's comprehension. She nervously continued, hoping to god that she could break it down far enough.

"Humans made up the story of Macbeth to show that being greedy will kill all of us eventually. When all you do is just kill and take just for yourself and no one else, ... before you know it, all your friends are dead and all you have left is enemies."

"Strong not care. Smash everything."

"Yeah, but then when _everything's_ all gone, what will you eat?"

"..." Strong blinked dumbly as though the atrophied synapses in his brain were suddenly being used at full capacity. After some three minutes or so, Ruby began to suspect he was having a stroke.

"Strong?"

"Tell Strong about milk. What are straight words?"

"Well, being full of the milk of human kindness means that you have compassion for others."

"Comp-ash-hun?" Strong's look of angered confusion now progressed to a strange state of contemplation as he let that sink in.

"That's when you see someone suffering and you want to help them."

Strong looked at her suspiciously as though she were talking about butt stuff again.

"What?" Ruby asked cautiously.

"Only weak suffer! Weak should die!" he insisted furiously, pounding his fist on his knee.

"So you shouldn't have shared with me?! And I suppose I shouldn't have helped you either?!" Ruby matched his volume angrily. Her fear of being beaten to death eclipsed by her temper.

Strong deflated and stared at her. He looked away from her toward the ground and palmed the back of his head as though he were getting a headache.

Dogmeat sat off to the side between the two of them at full, anxious attention. When Ruby finally noticed him, his nose jerked away from Strong and pointed at her, his round brown dog eyes nervously looking both away and back in rapid succession, waiting for her to do anything else besides look at him. But she was petrified.

"When Strong help human... " Strong finally broke the silence, supposedly stringing everything together in his head. "... and human help Strong... " She watched him absently brushing his fingers over the fresh scab on his arm. "That was milk of human kindness?" He looked up at her for an answer.

"Yes, Strong."

"STRONG HAVE HUMAN KINDNESS!" Strong abruptly shot up and roared into the night sky as if he had just ripped the head off a death-claw, the explosion of sound and movement jolting Ruby and the dog. "STRONG SHARE WITH BROTHERS!"

While he triumphantly stomped away from her, she sighed in relief, feeling more drained than she had ever been in her life. She drearily watched Dogmeat yip and hop around Strong's legs until she finally dropped. She enjoyed the first deep sleep since she first stepped out of that cryo-pod almost two weeks ago.

She dreamed of Nathan.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Ruby awoke the next morning and found herself immobilized under a tangle of hot and heavy green limbs. Strong snored loudly in her ear and unconsciously tightened his arm at her movement. Trying to save herself from suffocation, she frantically kicked at Strong until he finally woke up with a start. He grumbled stubbornly and released his grip on her.

"What the hell, Strong?" Ruby yanked herself up and brushed the grit and sweat from her shoulders and sides.

"What?"

"Since when are we sleeping together?"

"Brothers always sleep in pile." He sat up and yawned.

"I thought you were going to go share kindness with your brothers or something!"

"Strong want to..."

"Yeah, so why haven't you?"

He looked away. That furrowed brow letting her know that he was searching for words again.

"Strong not understand how kindness make humans stronger than super mutants. Human help Strong, but still weak. Fall asleep right after."

"*sigh* Helping you had nothing to do with that. I fell asleep because I was tired, Strong. I hadn't slept in days."

"Why human not sleep?"

"WHY? I've told you that if I make one mistake out here I'm dead! Everything out here can and will kill me at the first chance! Even you!"

"This is straight words, human."

She looked away trying to hide her knee jerk emotional reaction to his agreeing with her. "Look..." she found herself searching for words this time.

"Tell Strong what to do." He was studying her face. She gave up the search for words.

"Keep an eye out for me while I get dressed."

 

~

 

Ruby led him to Valentine's last known location, and things moved a lot faster. Valentine turned out to be a real old time copper and he would have preferred if his rescue didn't end in a bloodbath, but Strong botched any chance of that happening. Strong just couldn't resist ripping people to shreds if they showed even the slightest aggression, so they left a trail of mutilated bodies through the subway tunnel and into that unfinished vault. There was some intrigue about the case; that missing girl he was looking for for turned out to have made a place for herself at the top of the gang ladder, and there was a standoff when they tried to escape. Valentine wanted her to come home for the sake of her parents, but she wouldn't hear it. Ruby challenged her life choices, pointing out that if she was so good with that bat, she didn't need to be hanging off that fat fuck's arm when her family probably needed her more. To Valentine's surprise, she actually agreed and took off, sending her jilted lover into a rage that would end his life, and those that remained of his gang.

Once it was all said and done, there would be a softball lecture from Nick on the way back to Diamond City about laying down with dogs, followed by an apology to Dogmeat. The drift was lost on Strong, but Ruby understood. Nick dragged her back to the world of the living with his firmly rooted ethics and his seemingly bottomless capacity for sympathy. His being a battered android didn't register with Ruby at all until he himself brought it up. His mannerisms were so natural. Even familiar, like somebody's hard-nosed uncle. He was a good guy and it broke her heart to see him waste his kindness on the petty and bigoted populace of Diamond City. With his knowledge of all the goings on he was able to string together what happened and finally set her out on the trail of Nate's murderer.

At the final showdown that the manhunt led up to, Ruby didn't even give the guy the dignity of opening his mouth before she shot him in the face. Once done, she realized her error and was again left with no leads except for some augmentations that spilled out of his shattered skull.

"That was good kill, make Strong proud!" Strong stood behind her.

"He could have told me where Shaun is, but now he's dead." She still tried to keep her voice steady, though it was a vain attempt. "How could I be so stupid?" she whimpered and sank into a pit of despair.

Strong for once didn't have a counter point. He watched her stand there and blubber for a solid five minutes before something finally came to him.

“Human hungry? Strong have meat to share.”

 

~

 

To add insult to injury, the BOS showed force overhead with a massive airship that blocked the sun as she stepped out of the old fort. She finished her mystery chop numbly and watched the bloated silver whale float by, farting out vertibirds while a voice on a megaphone spoke of peaceful intentions. Strong wondered why that 'building' didn't fall. Not even five seconds later her radio started blowing up with messages from Danse demanding her report. She really didn't want to meet up with them again, especially since she hadn't done anything they asked, and they had that on her. Strong's obtuse dislike of their 'strange building' sealed the decision. So she set off on the long trek back to Valentine's agency. Strong still stuck with her.

 

~

 

That night around the campfire, Ruby untied her bandanna from around her neck and retied it around the rear cylinder opening. She started laying out bullet points in her head that she would run by Preston once she had returned to Sanctuary. He would know better than anyone which course of action would be the most feasible. Her dealings with the Brotherhood of Steel would undoubtedly come to bite her in the ass later, but for now she decided to stick with her current plan of milking them for resources and intel.

She poured a little vodka into a tin cup and dipped a bore brush in it before running it down the revolver's barrel. She started to miss Nate again. He was always so calm and collected. A willowy fair skinned blonde that could be described as elegant compared to Ruby; she was broad shouldered and angular from her long stints at the gym, and still sporting scars on her face from that night that would get her booted from basic training. That fearsome look did the Indiana farm girl well as she clawed her way up through a slew of simultaneous odd jobs and law school before becoming one of the top prosecutors in the state of Massachusetts, making a living out of putting people away. But she had no friends until she met Nate. As she was leaving her car and walking past the bus station she saw him. He was fresh off his tour of duty and was struggling to hail a taxi. He looked so nervous like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car that she couldn't help but step up beside him and flag one down for him. He looked to thank her, their eyes met, and there was no turning away.

Nate was a decorated war hero, but the neighbors always gave the new couple a hard time. Their dislike wasn't overt, but rather seething just below the surface of green lawns and picket fences. It didn't matter how immaculate Nate kept the house and yard, or how nice their car was, or how many neighborhood watch meetings she attended with his famous pasta salad. Nate was a long haired girly and they hated him more for taking a big black wife. Only they and the lesbian couple next door got the dirty looks, the underhanded compliments. The police knocking on their door because someone reported seeing 'suspicious persons'. In any case, the joke was on them because she outlived all of them and now owned the neighborhood. She began to suspect that the petty bullshit of human beings could never really be burned away by nuclear fire, or bred out of it's survivors for that matter.

Then she saw that Strong was apparently trying out those push-ups that she was doing the other day. His whole body shook with the effort of maintaining the correct form. Perhaps, despite his terrifying amount of strength, there were groups of muscles in his back and legs that he never used. Maybe next he would try taking a bath. His giant floppy supermutant dick hung conspicuously from under his armor and touched the ground. It only lifted off when his arms were about halfway extended. It was uncut and calloused as the rest of him and it was probably the scariest thing she had ever seen. And she fought monsters every day.

Ruby chose to say nothing and reassemble her revolver before he noticed her staring.

 

~

 

Valentine knew of a neuroscientist in the nearby back alley shack town called Goodneighbor. Once there, they were greeted by a goon that immediately tried to extort them for protection. Strong wanted to see Ruby sock him in the mouth, but before she could, a wrinkly lunatic in a colonial costume walked up and shanked him. That wrinkly lunatic turned out to be the mayor of this town.

Goodneighbor was obviously more dangerous, but somehow easier to handle than Diamond City. The population was much more representative of the commonwealth's actual diversity. They were mostly ghouls, since there was an outright ban on ghouls in Diamond City, and their were also a few sentient bots in the mix. Takahashi was a glorified cuisinart by comparison to the assaultron arms dealer. Strong caught sight of a rocket launcher in her display and picked it up for a better look. Knowing that he wasn't planning on putting it back, Ruby bartered for it on the spot. KLEO gave her a discount under the condition that she always bring Strong if she came to see her again.

Valentine's expert had set up shop in what appeared to be a seedy opium den. Unfortunately she didn't have a means of examining the augmentation properly. She could, however, insert the thing into Valentine's head and put him in what she called a memory viewer. After he selflessly participated in viewing the memories of Nate's murderer, Ruby again kicked herself for making him do it. The experience was jarring and intense. She came out of the pod feeling sick to her stomach and emotionally exhausted. She wanted to stay with Nick for a while to make sure he was okay; he seemed to have been affected by the experience more than he was letting on.

Shaun was a child now, with her hair and his father's eyes. But by now he was a native to this world, and she was a stranger in it. He was apparently safe and well, but he would not know her. The drive to find him was still there, but it wasn't as frantic as it was. It was just as daunting to think about, however. She would need to stockpile her arsenal and bolster the Minutemen into a real army if she wanted a chance at taking the Institute. That was, if she could even find the place. She needed more information, more people, more supplies. She would have to do some modifications to her power armor back in Sanctuary if she wanted to last more than two minutes in the glowing sea.

Goodneighbor was not the place to go for healthy solutions to one's problems. But Ruby was tired of trekking and decided to take up the mayor's recommendation of the local dive when Valentine needed some alone time.

Almost immediately another random thug flagged her down. Thankfully this guy looked ex-military and just had a work order that needed filled. She appreciated that he was willing to leave her be with his contact info.

There was a live jazz singer, which Ruby didn't expect. She was lanky and thin and her singing was just barely on point, but in a cultural vacuum like this, she must have been a real diva the way everyone drank in her performance.

The Third Rail, as it was called, had a limited selection, but everything was cold, and supposedly not dilute. She ordered a couple shots of whiskey for herself and her over sized companion, who sat uncomfortably on the human sized bar stool next to hers. The bottle presented to her was a brand that she recognized. She let herself get a little giddy about sampling two centuries old rye whiskey. Pouring it into the glasses, she found it to be slightly more viscous and the perfume of the grain alcohol was especially pungent.

Upon being offered one of the tiny glasses, Strong expressed that he hated humans drinking all the time, and he hated robots even more. She didn't blame him on the drinking; the last time she had a few too many he almost lost an arm. The hard boiled, cockney-ed Mr. Handy behind the bar responded to Strong's animosity in kind. Ruby threw her shot back and slammed the empty glass back down onto the counter in traditional fashion. She found herself involuntarily ticking her head to one side for the burn of that old scotch was incredibly powerful. As for the flavor, it was like cigar smoke and leather with spices. She poured herself another one and asked for a beer chaser. She had officially given up.

Strong, having watched Ruby's reaction to the drink, took up his shot glass between his thumb and forefinger. He downed it as she had done, and sneered at the taste of it. But he licked his lips and looked back at the empty vessel, appearing to be resentful of it looking like a thimble in his huge fingers. He put it down, as Ruby expected, but then pushed it toward her with a nod as though he actually liked the stuff. It started to dawn on her that she was now feeding concentrated distilled alcohol to a guy that could accidentally kill someone just by falling on them. Fuck it.

Ruby downed her second shot, refilled and offered the rest of the bottle to Strong. He took it and it was emptied in a single draft. He sneered again but this time shook his head as though some of it might have gotten in his nose. Ruby's slapping the bar with her open palm was met with some reservation from the barkeep, but he complied and placed another bottle in it's place. He warned her that if Strong started wrecking up the place it was going on her tab, plus interest. Ruby, scout's honor, assumed full responsibility and asked that some clean water in a bowl be added for the dog perched on the bar stool on her opposing side. Charlie asked what the tin man and the scarecrow would be having, to which Ruby just started laughing and saying that he was alright. If he needed anyone killed he only had to ask.

Strong, having already had his mind made up about human drink, had of course never actually sampled it until now. His getting all greased up so quickly was probably a testament to his elevated super mutant metabolism. But he had also put away about two gallons of hard liquor in just under ten minutes. He hung his head limply, propping himself on the bar with his elbows when Ruby asked him if he was feeling any better.

"Strong feel strange. Like falling... but... up." He pointed upward sloppily, his wrist using it's full articulation for once. It gave her the impression that his immense weight and repetitious pattern of injuries left him with stiff and aching joints, of which he was no longer consciously aware.

"Sounds like you're feeling pretty good then." Ruby grinned, now on her third boilermaker. "Anything you wanna talk about?"

"Humans talk too much." Strong started to sway a little bit.

"Yeah, so what else is new?" Ruby downed the last of her beer, slammed the bottle down and wiped the foam from her lips with her sleeve while Strong straightened his back in his seat and started rolling his head from one side to the other. He groaned euphorically after each loud crack of the vertebrae in his thick neck. Then he started to get up.

"Need piss." he turned away and whipped it out right there at the bar.

"No wait! Strong! Not in here!" Ruby jumped up as soon as she saw the head of that python.

"ghhuUUGH! WHY?!" Strong dropped his arms to his side and howled at the ceiling with contempt.

"Because I have a hell of a time keepin' this place clean without shloshin' aroun' in a lake o' mutant piss, ya gassed josser!" Charlie didn't hesitate to use his flamethrower before Ruby could even get up. Strong, in his inebriation, comically reacted in the fashion of the late Boris Karloff; growling loudly and swatting at the flames in his retreat. He clumsily hit his head on the doorway. He briefly regained his bearings, and looked back at Ruby like she could have done anything.

"Rules are rules, Strong! I'll be out in a minute." She struggled to contain her laughter and shooed him on from her seat.

"Yeah, go and drain yer tank outside like ye got some manners!"Charlie finished chasing him out, snuffed his pilot light and went back to the bar.

"ROBOT NOT TELL STRONG WHAT TO DO!" Strong roared but continued stumbling up the stairs anyway.

"Dogmeat, keep an eye on him for me, would ya?" She sent the dog trotting out the door with a finger point. Then she set about finding the ladies room. She haphazardly wandered around for what seemed like an eternity until she finally came to a foul old bathroom that clearly didn't have running water. The shit was mounded all over the long dry toilets and every corner in the room, and yet there was a beaten walkway and pools of steaming urine as though it was still in frequent use. So she threw up violently. Machinery that can interface with the human brain and yet no fucking working toilets.

Once relieved, she rinsed off with her canteen and started making her way back. On the way she overheard some goons hassling a guy that couldn't have been older than twenty, or an ounce over ninety pounds. Something about doing jobs in their territory. Once he had told them off, the little guy noticed her standing there and asked if she needed an extra gun. He clearly had some baggage, but she really needed a guy that could pick locks, understood the concept of stealth, and most of all wouldn't ever try to take the moral high ground with her. Maccready said he was up for whatever, and Ruby took him on, handing him his starting pay without hesitation. She started to lead him out back toward the front entrance when she clumsily walked right into Strong's midsection.

"Hey, Strong!" she wobbled and looked up. Strong only grumbled in response.

"Woah! Wait a minute! Is he what I think he is?" Maccready raised an eyebrow and pointed.

"Cool it, kid-o, he's a friend. You said you were up for whatever, right?" Ruby turned to him with one saucy hand on her kicked out hip.

"Yeah, I guess I did..." he smirked.

"Strong make decision." Strong stated loudly and abruptly.

"Strong, you're drunk..." Ruby spun back around and palmed his shoulder as firmly as she could muster. "don't make decisions when your dru-"

"Ruby would make good super mutant. Together we teach kindness to brothers!" he poked her in the chest and she stumbled a little, then took hold of his wrist with both hands to steady herself.

"Ho-wow! You really  _ are _ drunk!" Maccready grinned nervously, still keeping a safe distance.

"Strong..." Ruby looked up at him in disbelief. This was the first time he actually called her by name. "Seriously, what-"

"Strong think long time. Think till head hurt!" he pulled from her grasp and palmed both of Ruby's shoulders with a grip that would have made her cry if she were sober. He locked eyes with her. "You good leader. Brothers will give mutha fukkin respect. Strong will conquer all super mutants for you."

"Hoe - lee fuck..." Maccready, murmuring under his breath, was now fighting laughter and looking around the room for anything else to look at besides that display of whatever the fuck that was.

 

~

 

Ruby would rather pass out in an open field than lie down in one of those crusty lice ridden mattresses in town, so she and her team headed out into the night. After Ruby agreed to 'clean out' the Goodneighbor warehouses in exchange for coming up short on her tab, of course. She didn't remember most of that – just shooting at anyone she didn't recognize in a dark building. She may or may not have reported her success back to Charlie before leaving, but she remembered telling him about the godawful state of the restrooms in that place and how he blew her off because the sinks worked fine. She vaguely recalled some further interaction with the mayor and his bitch of a body guard. She had a clear memory of punching her in the mouth, followed by some raspy cackling. Then they were on their way again.

She had never really traveled at night, and so came to appreciate a few sights and sounds that would only become available after dark. She could hear strange and unfamiliar animal calls. In the full moonlight she caught what appeared to be a deathclaw mating dance out in the open some couple hundred yards away. She was amazed at how graceful and affectionate it was. Maccready had to grab her by the arm before they would be noticed. There were also even greater gargantuans stalking the ruins in the darkness, their slow footfalls reverberating through the ground and into her feet from some distance away. At the sound of a terrible rumble echoing through the old buildings, Strong snatched Ruby up and ran, barely keeping up with Dogmeat and Maccready as they tried to put more distance between themselves and certain death.

They made camp in her usual secluded spot under the collapsed overpass which marked the halfway point between Sanctuary and old downtown Boston. Strong was pretty beat by the time they got there, so he leaned against the cement pylon, slid down and drifted off almost instantly. Without thinking, Ruby offered up her sleeping bag to Maccready and made herself comfortable between Strong's tucked up knees. She kept him up for a while longer asking him about himself and his need for cash. He was shy at first, but started to open up. Poor kid had a rough life; grew up orphaned with weapons and shady characters as his only constant companions. And yet, he didn't strike her as the usual dirt bag mercenary that she had always come across up to this point. Something in his face that indicated both seasoned focus and youthful bonhomie. The fact that he didn't bother to ask how or why she and Strong had become friends, was also refreshing. There must have been more, but she felt it best not to pry.

 

~

 

Ruby brought Maccready and Strong back to her home in Sanctuary Hills to nurse her hangover. The bodies of all the raiders she killed in Concord had been picked apart by predators, but the enormous corpse of the deathclaw was still there, swarming with bloat flies stinking to high heaven. Ruby chopped it's head off so that she could mount it in her living room.

She directed Maccready to a locked weapons cabinet that housed an experimental cryo-weapon in the vault. They also grabbed all the other things that weren't nailed down.

Nate was second generation Icelandic and as per his request, Ruby had already burned his body and his ashes were still in that coffee tin on the kitchen counter where she had left them. Taking them to the sea would have to wait for another day.

In the meantime there was a lot of work being done to turn that old neighborhood into a proper one. For all her efforts, Ruby was now inexplicably founder, commander in chief and superintendent of the entire settlement. Codsworth was an invaluable asset in tending to human needs, but she still found herself ultimately responsible for the health and well being of these grown-ass adults. They were all natives to this climate and yet somehow none of them knew how to farm, or cook, put a hammer to a nail, or use a goddamned toilet from the way they just glazed over her plans to rebuild the dilapidated homes, build a couple generators to run power to lights and alarm sirens, set up a water treatment system...

Sturges was conscious enough to help her with the technical work, and Preston Garvey could handle guard duty for the time being, and good old Codsworth kept with his protocol of keeping Ruby going with cold water and hot towels. She didn't mind setting up a chair for Mama Murphy, who could barely stand for more than a few minutes at a time. But she had to practically force the gardening spade into Marcy Long's hands. Her sad sack husband, Jun, she had to sit down and basically beg him to find the strength to salvage junk for it's base parts. She might as well have packed him a bag lunch and some mittens.

 

~

 

In looking to scavenge or trade with another settlement, Ruby came across the old Greygarden, which was still operating to her amazement. The handy-bots running the place were hospitable enough, but they were in desperate need of help with their water treatment facility. She agreed to help, but after taking a gander at the place through a sniper scope she figured out the problem right away; super mutants. She silently made the executive decision to come back to that one and instead moved further south to the old train station. The woman living there, the instant she heard the word minutemen she begged for help with a gang of raiders in a nearby department store who had kidnapped her sister. It was just as well because Strong was boiling over with hunger for human flesh by that point. Aside from the terrified hostage, there would be no survivors. Raider loot was then distributed to the previously helpless farmers under Minutemen protection.

 

~

 

That night, in the relative absence of gunfire and vertibirds, she listened to the ambient noises of the night. There was always popping from distant guns and grenades, but in her immediate vicinity she could hear those nocturnal animal calls and chirps again. After a while she could pick up some scratching and gurgling some distance ahead of her – she watched a handful of feral ghouls stumbling and pawing around through the busted display window of a dilapidated storefront a block away. The first time she saw a feral ghoul she couldn't stop stabbing the thing even after it had long stopped moving. Now she calmly observed the way their twisted and dusty bodies twitched and jerked in their mindless shuffling and digging. What they were searching for was anyone's guess; she had seen them clutching toys and other little personal effects in their deformed claw like fingers. From what she had heard, many of those creatures were alive before the war. Perhaps they tried to take shelter when the bombs hit – most huddled together in basements and subway tunnels. The radiation had both destroyed their features and somehow also slowed time for them. Whoever they used to be was long lost to misery and extreme senility as they aged into skeletal assemblages, barely alive and yet undying. A few pairs of glowing eyes looked upward from time to time – as though they had forgotten that the roof was collapsed and the waning moon was shining on them. One appeared in absolute bewilderment of it's silver glow in the glittering night sky.

"I hate ferals." Maccready's voice boomed in her ears after so many hours of silence. "They have a knack for getting you when you least expect it." he had risen to sitting in his bag without her noticing and was staring down those ghouls as though they had been heckling him. His fearsome sneer was cut by his shivering however. He tucked his knees up to his face for warmth.

"You good?"

"Yeah I'm fine." she caught a glimpse of his steelie blue eyes before he quickly averted his gaze.

"Lemme get this fire back up." Ruby whipped out her lighter and started scooping up some leaves.

"Don't!" Maccready shot forward but caught himself just short of grabbing Ruby's hand. She stopped herself in kind, seeing that he was struggling to keep his voice down in what must have been the memory of an ambush.

"Don't worry about it, I'm fine." he cleared his throat and went back to looking past her at those ghouls.

"Sorry I wasn't thinking..." Ruby began to recall that her first night was spent curled up in her dark and dilapidated bathroom with the dog, wide awake and dreading what could come crawling out of the rotting nightmare hell around her.

"You wanna go clear out that building?" She asked gently.

"Yeah. That sounds good." He took the safety off his already drawn pistol and started to get up.

"Okay." Ruby smiled and whistled sharply. Both Dogmeat and Strong hopped up with a start.

 

~

 

Further south still, she found another vault of people who were not frozen and doing just fine underground. They refused to barter for anything less than the precious nuclear fuel that she needed to fucking stay alive topside. She could have just let them be, but her crack team urged her to spend the rest of that day scouring the surrounding countryside for fusion cores, just out of spite.

There were a few scattered roadblocks of military vehicles and crashed vertibirds that housed some salvage and even a complete set of X0-1 power armor still locked in it's security cage. Ruby resolved to return with someone who could hack the terminal for that one. The dead cars littering the hills and valleys had about a one in fifty chance of still containing their fusion core but they would have no luck this time around.

Maccready wasn't keen on getting too close to the old mass pike interchange, but at least he was articulate enough to explain why.

"Humans talk too much! Stop talking and KILL enemies!" Strong shouted and pointed at the offending junk fort on the overpass. Thankfully the lookouts didn't notice him. Perhaps the plywood walls between them blocked the sound as well.

"Oh I would, pal, believe me." Maccready replied at a much lower volume. "But in case you hadn't noticed, there's somewhere around thirty guys up there, and there's only four of us. Plus there's only one way up and they've got it covered."

"Strong not care. Single brother kill many puny humans."

"You do realize that we just got done clearing out a building full of raiders, right?" Ruby reiterated

"Yeah, _raiders_. _Gunners_ , which is what those guys are, by the way, are a trained mercenary organization. They've got better gear, they're stronger because they don't eat out of trash cans, and I'm pretty sure they've already spotted us!" he pointed up at the red lazer point on Strong's temple and darted behind a dead tree.

"Strong move!" Ruby joined Maccready in the brush.

"Wh-" Strong followed them with his head only, saving his brain and instead absorbing that sniper bullet with one of his traps. "GAH!! WHO'S THERE?!" He ducked and spun around to berate the overpass. He was promptly shot again, this time it just barely grazed the top of his head. "GONNA FIND YOU! GONNA KILL YOU!" He reached back for his rocket launcher with one hand and pounded his chest with the other.

"Fuckin'-A!" Ruby knew she couldn't just run away from a fight with Strong around. Manic barking let her know that Dogmeat was unharmed for the moment, but she dared only to look for him once Strong started firing rockets at the enemies above. The bullets slowed, but

"GRENADE!" Maccready hugged his rifle and launched himself away from a hard metal egg that had just fallen at their feet.

"THAT'S IT!!" Ruby snatched the grenade up.

"Jeezus fuck risky business!" Maccready reflexively balled up at the sight of her tossing the grenade back up. They both watched that black nug fly up in a high and graceful arc. It fell cleanly between the ramps of highway, then exploded. The blast sent a dust cloud and a spattering of debris flying amid the fiery explosions from Strong's rockets.

"Save your ammo for when we get up there!" Ruby shouted loud enough for Strong to hear over the din of battle.

Strong needed no further instruction. He shoved that launcher back into the plating on his back and jogged out toward the lift station. The handful of guards on the ground saw him coming and started emptying their semi automatics into his thick flesh. He of course, was only phased enough to pick up a chunk of concrete the size of a person and throw it, crushing one man in an instant. Meanwhile Dogmeat had already flanked them and sank his teeth into another person's leg, causing more panic and screaming that seemed to really make Strong's day. He was taking lead like a bullseye but he was laughing and swinging bodies around like rope toys while the dog hopped up onto the lift platform and landed a paw on the call button. Once the platform was on it's way down, he turned his head to give the others a signal bark.

"My boys." Ruby was momentarily taken by their efficiency. Then a bullet zipped in and grazed her ear. "Shit!" She laughed away her panic and dove down the hill for the lift. "Keep us covered!"

"You're lucky you're doing me a favor! Crazy bitch!" Maccready ran sideways after her, keeping the end of that rifle pointed at the stronghold while he blew those high caliber rounds without scope.

By shooting at anything that moved, they managed to avoid being killed by the rain of bullets coming down on the elevator and make it all the way up to the hornet's nest. Upon stepping off, Strong almost got cut in half by machine gun fire but saved himself by destroying a turret with his last rocket. Then he flipped a rusted out auto chassis over the concrete barrier that a handful of gunners were hiding behind and provided a good distraction while the others fanned out behind him. There were still more gunners running around and swapping cover trying to surround them, and Ruby took every chance to fire slugs at exposed bodies while simultaneously trying to avoid getting hit herself. She counted sixteen actual hits before she had emptied both of her clips. She took grenades off a confirmed kill and quickly pitched them at another turret. Then an assaultron took Ruby by surprise. It chased her back toward the lift, where Strong was still picking up and smashing everything within reach. He was starting to slow down, but still enough left in him to grab that metal death machine by the arm and slap it violently against the pavement until it stopped moving. Dogmeat was still whizzing back and forth around them; at one point he came flying out from behind a barrier with a hand in his mouth and upon landing made a sharp bank left, leaving the appendage to be eaten by bullets slamming into the concrete inches from his paws. He kept circling around until he disappeared again and another gunner cried out in pain. Ruby had no idea where Maccready was until the head of another gunner perched on top of a bus suddenly exploded. All she could see was left was a grizzly veteran with a mini gun and a cigar and a balding scumbag in power armor with a lazer rifle. So she went for broke. She somersaulted behind another vehicle to avoid getting shredded. She waited for another shot from Maccready, then sprinted out and flanked them while they returned fire in his direction. She made the decision to go for the one in the power armor first since he wasn't wearing a helmet and she knew from personal experience that power armor was clunky and hard to pivot around. She lept onto his back and stabbed him in the head. The power armor frame seized in his final position, shielding her from that mini gun long enough for her to whip out her .44 and pop off the precious three bullets she had left at the last Gunner standing. She took a line of bullets in her climbing arm, but she finally hit him in the neck just under his chin. He jerked from the impact but carried on as though in shock – wide eyed and gurgling with the weight of his massive weapon pulling him down until he finally collapsed.

Ruby's arm gave out and she slid down the armor frame to land painfully on her feet. She had obliviously taken a second set of bullets in her shin. She had a stimpak, but it was still in her backpack down below. So she surveyed the scene of destruction – a crumbling stretch of four lane highway with trash and leaking bodies and billowing clouds of black smoke coming from wrecked tech and burning shacks. She couldn't remember where she last saw Strong. She turned her head at the sound of clicking nails on the pavement and saw Dogmeat approaching her, dripping with red and panting from the non-stop running and biting.

"How you doin', buddy?" She smiled at his bright eyes and erect ears, but bent down to check him for wounds none the less. Dogmeat shook himself off and subsequently sprayed her whole front with all that red. That beast was either supernaturally lucky or indestructible.

"I can't believe we just did that!" Maccready came walking up with his rifle over his shoulder.

"Feel any safer?" Ruby chuckled and wiped the blood from her eyes.

"Actually, yeah! This cost the Gunners big time! I don't think I'll be hearing from them again any time soon. Thank you!"

"You're welcome." Since Dogmeat was unhurt, Ruby stiffly rose up and went back to looking around. "Think they had any first aid up here?"

"I'll find it, you take it easy okay?" There was a flash of concern in Maccready's face upon seeing her limp, but he stifled it quickly and didn't try to stop her. He one-handed his weapon and jogged rather gracefully over debris and barrier to one of the shacks.

Ruby spotted Strong on his hands and knees, covered in red a few yards off.

"Strong! You still in one piece?" she called out and hobbled toward him. Dogmeat trotted ahead and reached him first, but circled him nervously until Ruby caught up. He was riddled with bullet holes and cuts all over his body. His midsection looked as though it had been gnawed into especially hard, so it was really no surprise that he was down. A human being would have been dead.

"Hard to breathe." He coughed and a mouthful of blood spilled out. "Good fight."

"Yeah..." Ruby tried to glaze over the sight of a loop of intestine protruding from his shredded belly. “Any fight you can walk away from I suppose...”

"Here ya go bos – shit Strong! How are you still alive?!" Maccready gawked shamelessly at Strong while he struggled to stand up. Ruby backed away in case he fell.

"I am super mutant!" Strong proudly asserted and straightened his back. "I am unstop-pable..." he trailed off and sure enough, fell flat on his face again, causing a small reverberation in the steel reinforced concrete. Ruby took one of the stimpaks from Maccready and used it on Strong.

"Get up, you bum. I need you to carry stuff."

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Without missing a beat they looted the gunners' junk fort and hauled as much as they could carry back to Sanctuary. Then they returned to Vault 81 and told them to suck it. The tape of their gruff and lewd diatribes was added to the vault's security archives. Ruby was then treated to a tour, and asked to tell a story to the school kids. However her 'boys', Strong in particular, simply hung around within arms reach and put up with a bunch of hurtful language and threats that were frankly laughable. These fucking people.

After finally getting around to the bartering that turned out to not be worth the effort, Ruby couldn't leave fast enough. But upon stepping outside she found that cat that had scampered past them when they first arrived. She of course couldn't help herself and brought it back inside. And as usual, she came to regret doing the right thing.

She got roped into solving a crisis that was really not her business. One of their woefully innocent children was bitten by a diseased mole rat and almost died because he saw an unused door down by the reactor. And of course, the vault dwellers were all too chicken shit to take action themselves, so Ruby uncovered an entire section of the vault that had gone completely unused for some time. Mole rats were hardly a challenge, but those damn turrets and that protectron kept them on their toes. Strange how the machinery was completely unconcerned with the fucking disease ridden mole rats tearing up the floors but humanoids and dogs were to be killed on sight. Then they finally came to an abandoned laboratory with some makeshift graves and a miss nanny still floating around with a vial of the cure in her pincers like a floating spherical angel. But she tried to explain that all the other medicine she had in there was expired, and Ruby couldn't just let that go. There were two hundred year old miracle drugs lying around outside that weren't expired, and once more, there was a perfectly good laboratory set up right there. Then Curie started crying and Ruby had to apologize for yelling. Maccready thought it was kind of cute the way she handled it, but Strong just ignored the whole exchange, instead rending and gulping down his fill of fresh mole rat.

Taking advantage of their gratitude, Ruby convinced the vault dwellers to keep in radio contact with the minutemen in case any of them grew a spine and wanted to help someone else out for once. God knows she could use the extra hands. Curie volunteered first; she was trapped down there for who knows how long all by herself and she was so eager to marvel at the world and lend herself to anyone she could. Of the only people Ruby could count on any more, almost half weren't even people. In order to complete her mission thus far, she had assembled a crack team of six humans, two robots, an android, a dog, and a super mutant. She wondered if she would then adopt a giant scorpion and name it tickles.

 

~

 

"Tinker, tinker, tinker! Strong bored!" Strong plopped himself down hard and barked from the now cracked concrete under the shadow of the carport.

Ruby twisted around from her work on some pipe welding and lifted her face shield.

"You shut the fuck up, Strong! I heard you the first six times!!" she pointed angrily at him with the business end of her still lit torch. "You're actin' like a lil' bitch right now! You're so fuckin' bored, get your big green ass up and go help Sturges! He's really strugglin up there!" Sturges was only feet away, jumping up and down on the remains of the house next door as he had been for several minutes.

"Oh... Strong obey you." and off he went.

Ruby fell silent and watched with a slack jaw as the big green elephant walked right up to Sturges, who looked like he had just clenched every muscle in his body at the sight of him.

"Strong bored! Tell Strong what to do!" Strong demanded sharply. It took Struges a few awkward seconds to register that Strong was just standing there waiting for a response.

"Okay then!" He quickly hopped down with his usual anxious smile. "Think you can help me untangle this mess?" he grabbed a length of steel scaffolding that was still lodged in that collapsed roof, but was barely able to lift it an inch. Strong watched him with his head cocked to one side, as if puzzled by Sturges' actions.

"Yes." Strong said finally. He lazily bent down, gripped that protruding bar and pulled it out with little effort, loosing all the rusted shingles and obliviously knocking Sturges aside.

"That's the ticket! Keep it up!" Sturges seemed both excited and terrified, hopping back up onto his feet and picking up all those fallen panels before carrying them off.

"Strong will do this." Strong's expression did not change as he watched Sturges for a moment. Then he went back to his work.

"Son of a bitch." Ruby honestly did not know what she was looking at.

"Son of a bitch indeed, mum!" Codsworth joined in the gawking at Ruby's side while he took the torch from her stiff hand and replaced it with a glass of water. She lifted it and started chugging it down while he dabbed that dry towel around her neck. "I must ask where you found that gentleman! Strong, you said was his name?"

"That's right. I met him at the Trinity Tower."

"The trinity tower is still standing?"

"Yeah, but it's been taken over by super mutants." Ruby watched Strong gather up all that metal, some pieces at long as he was tall, and bundle them under his arms like firewood. "A man named Rex Goodman was there trying to teach them human culture by reading to them from Shakespeare."

"Ha! Ha! Ho-wow." Maccready laughed and shook his head. Then went back to reloading spent shells with a crude hand press.

"A noble quest indeed! Was he successful?"

"What? God no! They locked him up in a cage! Anyway, long story short – Strong helped us escape. Then Rex gave me that dress and he went home." She pointed back to Maccready.

"And what a lovely gesture to part with, mum! It's very smart! Pity it was too small for you though!"

"Lookin' good, Bobby!" Ruby actually did enjoy seeing the shape of Maccready's svelte body in sequin. It was like a fond memory from her youth.

"Yeah yeah..." She could see his face redden from there.

 

~

 

Maccready was quick to run for the billowing clothes line as the sun began to sink behind Sanctuary's skeletal trees. Shivering in the New England November he snatched down his duster and wrapped it around his bare shoulders before retrieving the rest of his dressings.

Meanwhile Ruby had parked herself in a lawn chair up on the roof of her house. She had found that she was most comfortable up there where she could see the entire neighborhood and any potential invaders as far as the Red Rocket. A handful of new people had arrived and they were already making themselves useful lending extra hands here and there. They were thin and dirty, but Ruby was glad to see anyone doing anything other than raiding or dying.

"General! The Abernathy's are under attack! We have to go now!!" Preston burst out from Minutemen HQ across the street, lazer musket already in hand. Dogmeat shot out from his dog house and joined him.

Abernathy farm was a stone's throw away from Sanctuary. The gunfire and explosions could be heard even before their distinctive radio tower would appear over the hills. As they drew nearer, Ruby heard loud and booming voices that she dreaded to hear again. By the time of the posse's arrival, there were craters from grenades, but there didn't seem to be any humans down. A pair of the mutants were already looting; one was tearing up crops from the soil and the other brutally butchering the family brahmin with a car door that had been sharpened. Another two were just short of the destroyed front door firefighting the Abernathy's, who had fortified themselves up on the roof of the house.

Preston, though the first to arrive, was smart enough to hug a tree some yards off while the others caught up. Dogmeat waited at his heel while Ruby and Maccready joined him.

"Orders, General?" Preston was careful not to raise his voice.

"Stay low, fan out and aim for their heads. There's no telling how many more are inside." she bade Preston and Maccready to head in opposing directions around the property. Then she knelt and started making her way toward the action through the tall grass near the fence.

"BROTHERS!! STRONG CHALLENGE YOU!" Strong went thundering past her. He jogged right out through the open toward the mutants at the front door and swung the head of his sledgehammer into the side of one of them. The hollow thud of metal on thick meat could be heard by everyone in the vicinity, though the mutant only grunted sharply from the impact and stepped back in more or less irritation than shock.

"Your head broken brother!" the accompanying mutant barked and rammed the butt of his rifle into Strong's face, hitting him squarely in the nose. Then he proceeded to strike him repeatedly about the jaw and neck while he reeled. The first mutant then began to laugh and joined in the thrashing until Strong's hammer shattered his knee. He let out a blood curdling scream as his leg was swept out from under him.

"DAA!! GET IT OFF!!" Dogmeat was now firmly latched onto the other mutant's calf. This kept him occupied just long enough for Strong to coldly splatter the first mutant's head like a melon, then follow up with an upward swing that set the second into a spin with his jaw clearly dislocated. As soon as the supermutant dropped like a felled oak, Dogmeat bolted off for another green leg to bite.

"Gonna EAT DOG MEAT!!" the mutant out in the field started clumsily chasing Dogmeat with his rifle, firing, missing and reloading and missing again while his comically small antagonist hopped and yipped circles around him.

"You _strong_? HA!" The mutant with the 'knife' guffawed loudly, dropped the brahmin carcass and started marching toward Strong. "If Strong really strong, not need help from little doggie!"

"STOP TALKING AND FIGHT STRONG!!" Strong bellowed and pounded his chest.

The challenger stood more than a head higher than Strong, who simply dipped a shoulder and charged at him with a roar. The two shaved silver-backs slammed into each other with a force that could be heard yards away.

Another supermutant emerged from the house but was immediately dropped by a high caliber round, his body joining the pile at the front door. Maccready then started taking shots at the mutant chasing Dogmeat. Preston hopped out into the open and jogged around the house, intermittently firing at yet another supermutant that had made his way up through the house and was mere inches from getting the Abernathy's.

Meanwhile Strong began to wear down under the other supermutant's superior weight. After being shoved away a few times, Strong made another charge, and his waning velocity let his opponent drive that car door's edge deep into his shoulder. Strong roared in pain, but refused to let up,and grasped madly for the other mutant's head with his good arm.

"HA HA! You fight well little bleed—aaaaAAAAA!" Strong finally got hold of him and jammed his thumb into his enemy's eye until it popped and blood spurted out.

"Stop! Hurting! SPIKE!" Spike retaliated by repeatedly pulling and stabbing with each word. The wound sprayed more and more blood as it cleaved past Strong's shoulder and further into his chest. Strong would not let go even as he was being hammered down like a fence post.

Ruby had positioned herself at Spike's back, waiting for just this moment to shoot, but instead of risking a miss, she exploded into a full sprint. She lept up and aimed her bayonet at the nape of his neck, but fell short and the blade landed in his back instead, making a long incision in his thick hide while gravity pulled her down. When Spike twisted sharply and swatted her with the back of his arm, she might as well have been hit with a wrecking ball. She blacked out and woke up on the ground gasping for air, her ears ringing and the entire left side of her body pulsing painfully.

She felt the ground under her shake and frantically looked around for Strong. Amid the flying dirt and the flashes of gunfire she spotted the two green bodies tussling on the ground. Thankfully it was Spike on his back and Strong was pinning him, still clutching his head by the orbital socket. With obvious agony Strong pulled hard with that one arm while Spike struggled to free himself by trying to rip the other one off.

While pawing around for her gun, Ruby's hearing returned and she faintly recognized Strong's pained howling. Something inside her started screaming. She rolled to her feet, unstrapped her ax and widened her grip on it's handle just enough to guide that heavy head into Spike's arm. It split with a satisfying crack and the sudden release gave Strong a second wind.

"WH... HUAN HEL.. LI-... EED-r..?!" Spike demanded. Strong answered with more ferocious shouting and Ruby was too deaf to understand either of them. She looked on, at a loss for her next move. Her body started to list and she watched almost serenely as Strong wrenched Spike's head from his shoulders. She could see the vertebrae popping, and she could almost hear it. Then through the whining and distant thunder she understood a word coming out of the supermutant's mouth.

"Brotherrr! Whyy..." it was the end of the supermutant's rage, but clear as day. As soon as it was said, the flesh of Spike's neck gave way and Strong almost fell backwards as his prize was torn free.

"NOT BROTHER! STROOOONG!!" Strong bellowed and held Spike's head aloft, holding it with embedded fingers like a bowling ball.

"BROTHER!! NOOOO!!" the mutant that had been failing to catch Dogmeat and getting shot by Maccready stopped in his tracks. With a crazed scream he charged at Spike's killers. "NOW! I'M! ANGRYYY!!"

Then the blazing red discharge of a lazer musket streaked across the field and sheared off the top of his head.

"RANNNANNAaammnnng!!" The last super mutant bellowed and stumbled, slobbering red from his gaping mouth. Dogmeat lunged at his back but the dying abomination was still able to kick him away and continue throwing himself forward. Ruby dumbly readied her ax and squared up to decapitate him the exact moment his neck was in 'the butter zone'.

She underestimated his speed. She landed her blade into his chest just before he slapped her to the side. She again was left wheezing on the ground while Strong backhanded that supermutant with the severed head of his comrade. His attacker teetered to one side from the blow, lost his footing and fell hard. All the while he flailed his limbs trying to right himself. Strong tiredly pushed to his feet and looped his good arm around the other mutant's neck.

"Next time fight better!" With a swift jerk, Strong coldly crushed his neck in the fold of his elbow, ending his nonsensical mewling with a loud crunch.

While the last mutant fell limp in his arm, Strong's eyes lifted from him and landed on Ruby. They became locked in a strange moment where Ruby saw more than weariness in him. He seemed lost in an abyss.

He finally looked away and he dropped the giant corpse in disgust.

"Strong wanted a fight ..." he half-collapsed-half-sat down with a huff.

"Boy! I'd hate to see what you think a real fight is! That guy literally tore you apart! I can see your lungs right now!" Preston was administering first aid to the dog just before he got up and pointed at Strong. Strong ignored him.

"Actually, I think Strong's right. One super mutant against four usually goes the other way around." Maccready yelled down from his perch on top of a silo. With that facetious smirk, it was sometimes hard to tell if he was joking or not.

"SO EVERYBODY'S OKAY, RIGHT?" Ruby's own voice was faint to her still. She hollered upward at the Abernathy's, who were now waving and smiling while they hoisted a supermutant corpse over the ledge and into the pile below. Then someone stuck a pressurized syringe into her shoulder.

“Thanks, Garvey.” she turned to look up at him as her head cleared.

“No problem, General.” he replied. “It's getting dark, we should head back.”

“Go on ahead, I'll catch up.”

“Yes sir.” Dogmeat trotted along after him.

"Brothers weak. Not even have leader." Strong kicked the dead mutant in front of him. She briskly hopped up to her feet and dusted off. Strong was still staring at his dead brothers, wiping their blood from his face with his good arm and the other drooping lifelessly from the other side.

"Wait, wasn't _he_ the leader?" Ruby pointed at Spike's mangled corpse.

"Leader of supermutants never fight first." Strong scowled at her. "Always order brothers to fight first."

"Huh..." Ruby absorbed that for a moment. She had often heard people of her time touting military leaders that would heroically throw themselves into battle before risking anyone else. Despite the sparkling white wash on everything in her time, she lived on a pig farm with no electricity thanks to the resource wars. The well off enjoyed sleak chrome robot butlers while ordinary citizens like her older siblings were blindly blowing one another to pieces for the lack of career options. Meanwhile the leadership safely bragged about their own accomplishments on television.

She searched her pockets for a stimpak but found none.

"Strong not like killing brothers to help humans." His face was now hollowing from blood loss. His algae green skin bleached to more of a sea-foam color.

"..." Ruby's chest tightened. She looked around for any possible med stash but settled for Maccready at the foot of the silo already waving a stimpak at her. She nodded gratefully.

"I'm sorry." Ruby moved in and lifted Strong's surprisingly hefty shoulder back into place. Funny no one demanded that she show remorse for culling human raiders, even the ones that turned out to be prepubescent children. If a human being ever showed Strong's level of grief at the loss of strangers, they would have been granted sainthood.

“I wish they could have been stopped some other way.” She was already trying to put scenarios together in her head,but for now they kept ending with her getting eaten.

"What is other ...way..." Strong let his eyes close.

"Nice work, soldier. Here's your medal." Maccready casually walked up and jabbed that stimpak into Strong's chest. He swatted at him angrily but was too weak to do more than give him a pitiful nudge.

 

~

 

Most settlers were already in the habitual tradition of having evening parties with music, dancing, and of course lots and lots of home brew to take the edge off the day. They seemed to think they had a major victory to celebrate after the supermutant attack, so that night Sanctuary was aglow with a bonfire and filling with people from adjacent settlements.

Strong could never participate in human parties even if he wanted to. He did partake in a fair helping of the moonshine however and then went to stare at the river in silence. Ruby let him be for the moment, needing some alone time herself.

All the work she did that day on the new boiler was well worth turning the nob in her shower and having hot water come out. She let it run all over her bare skin with a happy sigh of relief and leaned on the wall, enjoying herself for several minutes. Then she went for the soap and started lathering up.

She heard heavy footfalls in the living room. Strong had made himself a nest out of the old furniture in there so she figured he was just turning in for the night. However his footfalls continued to grow louder until the shower curtain was suddenly jerked away.

“Shit! What the hell Strong?!” she reflexively covered her breasts and crotch with her hands.

He said nothing, but instead became absorbed in pawing at the hot water coming from the shower head. She got a big whiff of corn whiskey and grew concerned for her safety. “Everything okay?”

He ran the water over his forearm and watched a layer of grime wash away, revealing a much brighter green underneath. He glanced back at her drearily and then retracted to loosen his armor.

“Um... Strong wait a minute-” she stepped back as the metal plates fell to the tile at Strong's feet.

He again said nothing and stooped to clear the curtain bar.

“NononoStrong you're too big for-”Ruby retreated helplessly to the corner of the stall and watched in utter confusion while he squatted directly under the water and pulled the curtain back behind him. “Okay, I guess this is fine...”

They shared that tiny space for a long moment in silence until Ruby gave up and sat herself down. She joined him in watching the thick brownish filth flush off his skin and down the drain. The smell bloomed briefly and then slowly started to dissipate as the water started to run clear again. He slowly shook his head with a groan of euphoria most unbecoming of a supermutant.

“What human call this?” he slurred and gestured at the fixture above him.

“It's called a shower.”

“Strong like shower.”

“I can see that...” she sneered at his pendulous junk and defensively wrapped her arms around her tucked knees.

His eyelids drooped and he started drifting off, but then became focused on something that he felt compelled to pick at on his forearm. A light stream of thick dark fluid leaked down to his elbow as he dug his fingers in.

"Woah! What!? What are you doing? Is that blood? What is that?"

"Maybe." Strong grunted as he started pulling a shard of glass as long as Ruby's hand out of his flesh.

"O my god! Doesn't that hurt?"

"Yes." Strong absently tossed the shard past the curtain where it smashed on the tiles. Ruby cringed at the possibility of cutting her feet up if she stepped out now. Strong clenched and unclenched his fist, then started to bend his wrist and winced at a loud crack in the joint. Then with a relieved groan he rotated his still crunching wrist with half-lidded eyes. “Better now.”

Ruby pensively watched him run his hands over the rest of his arms and chest as though he were feeling for more things to pull out. He rubbed the back of his neck and seemed to have found something but couldn't quite reach far enough back to get a solid hold of it.

"Want some help?" Ruby volunteered without thinking.

"Yes." he leaned forward for her while she stood over him to find the oozing hole on the back of his left trap. She carefully pinched her thumb and forefinger and inserted them. She quickly felt what might have been some kind of metal shrapnel. She started pulling and could feel tissue tearing and loosing that thick dark reddish puss as she went. The cylindrical brass object got longer and longer until she had that fifty caliber sniper projectile from the other day in her hand.

"Holy ..." she marveled at it, and then at Strong, who was now rolling his head and left shoulder with immense relief.

The water had washed years of grime off his back, and she now could make out nearly a dozen more spots that were still exuding whatever stubborn filth had gotten lodged there. She shuddered at the realization that each of those spots potentially housed more embedded objects.

Without much warning Strong rested the side of his head against her stomach. She gasped from the shock of the contact and threw her hands up in fright. The heavy round hit the tub with a clang.

“Headache gone...” Strong droned.

“Strongyou'reinvadingmypersonalspace!” Ruby was effectively pinned to the wall.

“Hmmm … soft...”

“Pleasegetthefuckoffme!” she gingerly palmed his temple and pushed him away with both hands.

“MmrrRR!” Strong huffed drearily and sat up straight.

“Listen you jolly green jack-ass! I worked all goddamn day on this plumbing and I just wanted a nice relaxing shower but then _your big drunk ass_ busts in and now I've got soap in my eyes and you're hogging the fucking hot water! Get! Out!” She had quite enough of this lunacy, so she put her back against the wall and tried to push him out with her feet.

“No. Strong share with human.” he snarled at her.

Ruby hung in that position and returned the squinting glower in kind. They faced off for a few seconds until Strong snorted through his nose at her and patted a thigh with purpose.

“Sit human.”

“I ain't sitt'n on your fuckin' lap Strong!” she yelled.

“STRONG SHARE SHOWER WITH HUMAN!” He repeated sternly at an overwhelming volume.

“Ughh. Okay fine.” Her eyes were burning and she knew she had no hope of moving him. She stood down, picked up the soap and took her seat. At least he didn't smell so bad any more.

“Wash my back.” she handed him the soap roughly.

“Will do.”

 

 


End file.
